United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
Old Man Hatton had been surveying his shoes, his mouth grim. He looked
at Angie now and smiled a little. "Well, Angie, it looks as if you'd
found your job right here at home, doesn't it? This young lady's just
one of hundreds, I suppose. Hundreds. You can have the whole house for
them, if you want it, Angie, and the grounds, and all the money you
need. I guess we've kind of overlooked the girls. H'm, Angie. What d'you
say?"
But Tessie was not listening. She had scarcely heard. Her face was white
with earnestness.
"C'n you speak French?"
"Yes," Angie answered.
"Well," said Tessie, and gulped once, "well, how do you say in French:
'Give me a piece of bread'? That's what I want to learn first."
Angie Hatton said it correctly.
"That's it! Wait a minute! Say it again, will you?"
Angie said it again.
Tessie wet her lips. Her cheeks were smeared with tears and dirt. Her
hair was wild and her blouse awry. "Donnay-ma-un-morso-doo-pang," she
articulated, painfully. And in that moment, as she put her hand in that
of Chuck Mory, across the ocean, her face was very beautiful to see.
ONE HUNDRED PER CENT
They had always had two morning papers--he his, she hers. The _Times_.
Both. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the plan on which Mr. and
Mrs. T.A. Buck conducted their married life. Theirs was the morning calm
and harmony which comes to two people who are free to digest breakfast
and the First Page simultaneously with no--"Just let me see the inside
sheet, will you, dear?" to mar the day's beginning.
In the days when she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, travelling saleswoman
for the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York, her perusal
of the morning's news had been, perforce, a hasty process, accomplished
between trains, or in a small-town hotel 'bus, jolting its way to the
depot for the 7.52; or over an American-plan breakfast throughout which
seven eighths of her mind was intent on the purchasing possibilities of
a prospective nine o'clock skirt buyer. There was no need now of haste,
but the habit of years still clung. From eight-thirty to eight
thirty-five A.M. Emma McChesney Buck was always in partial eclipse
behind the billowing pages of her newspaper. Only the tip of her topmost
coil of bright hair was visible. She read swiftly, darting from war news
to health hints, from stock market to sport page, and finding something
of interest in each. For her there was nothing cryptic in a headline
such as "Rudie Slams One Home"; and Do pfd followed by dotted lines and
vulgar fractions were to her as easily translated as the Daily Hint From
Paris. Hers was the photographic eye and the alert brain that can film a
column or a page at a glance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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