itying disgust, and bit into it with the
middle-of-the-morning contempt that it deserved.

The mail carrier pushed back his cap and reflectively scratched his head.
How much over his month's wage would that green basket piled high with
exotic fruit come to?

Jennie stood and stared after they had left, and another line had formed.
If you could have followed her gaze with dotted lines, as they do in the
cartoons, you would have seen that it was not the peaches, or the prickly
pears, or the strawberries, or the muskmelon or even the grapes, that
held her eye. In the center of that wonderful window was an oddly woven
basket. In the basket were brown things that looked like sweet potatoes.
One knew that they were not. A sign over the basket informed the puzzled
gazer that these were maymeys from Cuba.

Maymeys from Cuba. The humor of it might have struck Jennie if she had
not been so Scotch, and so hungry. As it was, a slow, sullen, heavy
Scotch wrath rose in her breast. Maymeys from Cuba.

The wantonness of it! Peaches? Yes. Grapes, even, and pears and
cherries in snow time. But maymeys from Cuba--why, one did not even know
if they were to be eaten with butter, or with vinegar, or in the hand,
like an apple. Who wanted maymeys from Cuba? They had gone all those
hundreds of miles to get a fruit or vegetable thing--a thing so
luxurious, so out of all reason that one did not know whether it was to
be baked, or eaten raw. There they lay, in their foreign-looking basket,
taunting Jennie who needed a quarter.

Have I told you how Jennie happened to be hungry and jobless? Well, then
I sha'n't. It doesn't really matter, anyway. The fact is enough. If
you really demand to know you might inquire of Mr. Felix Klein. You will
find him in a mahogany office on the sixth floor. The door is marked
manager. It was his idea to import Scotch lassies from Dunfermline for
his Scotch linen department. The idea was more fetching than feasible.

There are people who will tell you that no girl possessing a grain of
common sense and a little nerve need go hungry, no matter how great the
city. Don't you believe them. The city has heard the cry of wolf so
often that it refuses to listen when he is snarling at the door,
particularly when the door is next door.

Where did we leave Jennie? Still standing on the sidewalk before the
fruit and fancy goods shop, gazing at the maymeys from Cuba. Finally her
Scotch bump of curi