"Please, can you help me out with a shilling?"
Jennie's nose was red, and her eyes watery. Said the
middle-aged family man with the kindly face:
"Beat it. You've had about enough I guess."
Jennie walked into a department store, picked out the oldest
and most stationary looking floorwalker, and put it to him. The
floorwalker bent his head, caught the word "food," swung about, and
pointed over Jennie's head.
"Grocery department on the seventh floor. Take one of those
elevators up."
Any one but a floorwalker could have seen the misery in
Jennie's face. But to floorwalkers all women's faces are horrible.
Jennie turned and walked blindly toward the elevators. There
was no fight left in her. If the floorwalker had said, "Silk
negligees on the fourth floor. Take one of those elevators up,"
Jennie would have ridden up to the fourth floor, and stupidly gazed
at pink silk and val lace negligees in glass cases.
Tell me, have you ever visited the grocery department of a
great store on the wrong side of State Street? It's a
mouth-watering experience. A department store grocery is a
glorified mixture of delicatessen shop, meat market, and
vaudeville. Starting with the live lobsters and crabs you work
your hungry way right around past the cheeses, and the sausages,
and the hams, and tongues, and head-cheese, past the blonde person
in white who makes marvelous and uneatable things out of gelatine,
through a thousand smells and scents--smells of things smoked, and
pickled, and spiced, and baked and preserved, and roasted.
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