Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million
John Stuart Mill · en
In Caliph Spraggins’s $3,000,000 home lived his sister Henrietta, who
used to cook for the coal miners in a twenty-five-cent eating house in
Coketown, Pa., and who now would have offered John Mitchell only two
fingers of her hand to shake. And his daughter Celia, nineteen, back
from boarding-school and from being polished off by private instructors
in the restaurant languages and those études and things.
Celia is the heroine. Lest the artist’s delineation of her charms on
this very page humbug your fancy, take from me her authorized
description. She was a nice-looking, awkward, loud, rather bashful,
brown-haired girl, with a sallow complexion, bright eyes, and a
perpetual smile. She had a wholesome, Spraggins-inherited love for
plain food, loose clothing, and the society of the lower classes. She
had too much health and youth to feel the burden of wealth. She had a
wide mouth that kept the peppermint-pepsin tablets rattling like hail
from the slot-machine wherever she went, and she could whistle
hornpipes. Keep this picture in mind; and let the artist do his worst.
Celia looked out of her window one day and gave her heart to the
grocer’s young man. The receiver thereof was at that moment engaged in
conceding immortality to his horse and calling down upon him the
ultimate fate of the wicked; so he did not notice the transfer. A horse
should stand still when you are lifting a crate of strictly new-laid
eggs out of the wagon.
Young lady reader, you would have liked that grocer’s young man
yourself. But you wouldn’t have given him your heart, because you are
saving it for a riding-master, or a shoe-manufacturer with a torpid
liver, or something quiet but rich in gray tweeds at Palm Beach. Oh, I
know about it. So I am glad the grocer’s young man was for Celia, and
not for you.
The grocer’s young man was slim and straight and as confident and easy
in his movements as the man in the back of the magazines who wears the
new frictionless roller suspenders. He wore a gray bicycle cap on the
back of his head, and his hair was straw-colored and curly, and his
sunburned face looked like one that smiled a good deal when he was not
preaching the doctrine of everlasting punishment to delivery-wagon
horses. He slung imported A1 fancy groceries about as though they were
only the stuff he delivered at boarding-houses; and when he picked up
his whip, your mind instantly recalled Mr. Tackett and his air with the
buttonless foils.
Tradesmen delivered their goods at a side gate at the rear of the
house. The grocer’s wagon came about ten in the morning. For three days
Celia watched the driver when he came, finding something new each time
to admire in the lofty and almost contemptuous way he had of tossing
around the choicest gifts of Pomona, Ceres, and the canning factories.
Then she consulted Annette.