So Big by Edna Ferber (read books for money .txt) 📕

that. There were seedlings that Pervus had bought in April to be paid for at the end of the growing season, in the fall. And now fall was here.

Fear shook her. She told herself she was tired, nervous. That terrible week. And now this. The heat. Soon they’d be home, she and Dirk. How cool and quiet the house would seem. The squares of the kitchen tablecloth. Her own neat bedroom with the black walnut bed and dresser. The sofa in the parlour with the ruffled calico cover. The old chair on the porch with the cane seat sagging where warp and woof had become loosened with much use and stuck out in ragged tufts. It seemed years since she had seen all this. The comfort of it, the peace of it. Safe, desirable, suddenly dear. No work for a woman, this. Well, perhaps they were right.

Down Wabash Avenue, with the L trains thundering overhead and her horses, frightened and uneasy with the unaccustomed roar and clangour of traffic, stepping high and swerving stiffly, grotesque and angular in their movements. A dowdy farm woman and a sunburned boy in a rickety vegetable wagon absurdly out of place in this canyon of cobblestones, shops, streetcars, drays, carriages, bicycles, pedestrians. It was terribly hot.

The boy’s eyes popped with excitement and bewilderment.

“Pretty soon,” Selina said. The muscles showed white beneath the skin of her jaw. “Pretty soon. Prairie Avenue. Great big houses, and lawns, all quiet.” She even managed a smile.

“I like it better home.”

Prairie Avenue at last, turning in at Sixteenth Street. It was like calm after a storm. Selina felt battered, spent.

There were groceries near Eighteenth, and at the other cross-streets⁠—Twenty-second, Twenty-sixth, Thirty-first, Thirty-fifth. They were passing the great stone houses of Prairie Avenue of the ’90s. Turrets and towers, cornices and cupolas, humpbacked conservatories, porte-cochères, bow windows⁠—here lived Chicago’s rich that had made their riches in pork and wheat and dry goods; the selling of necessities to a city that clamoured for them.

“Just like me,” Selina thought, humorously. Then another thought came to her. Her vegetables, canvas covered, were fresher than those in the nearby markets. Why not try to sell some of them here, in these big houses? In an hour she might earn a few dollars this way at retail prices slightly less than those asked by the grocers of the neighbourhood.

She stopped her wagon in the middle of the block on Twenty-fourth Street. Agilely she stepped down the wheel, gave the reins to Dirk. The horses were no more minded to run than the wooden steeds on a carrousel. She filled a large market basket with the finest and freshest of her stock and with this on her arm looked up a moment at the house in front of which she had stopped. It was a four-story brownstone, with a hideous high stoop. Beneath the steps were a little vestibule and a door that was the tradesmen’s entrance. The kitchen entrance, she knew, was by way of the alley at the back, but this she would not take. Across the sidewalk, down a little flight of stone steps, into the vestibule under the porch. She looked at the bell⁠—a brass knob. You pulled it out, shoved it in, and there sounded a jangling down the dim hallway beyond. Simple enough. Her hand was on the bell. “Pull it!” said the desperate Selina. “I can’t! I can’t!” cried all the prim dim Vermont Peakes, in chorus. “All right. Starve to death and let them take the farm and Dirk, then.”

At that she pulled the knob hard. Jangle went the bell in the hall. Again. Again.

Footsteps up the hall. The door opened to disclose a large woman, high cheek-boned, in a work apron; a cook, apparently.

“Good morning,” said Selina. “Would you like some fresh country vegetables?”

“No.” She half shut the door, opening it again to ask, “Got any fresh eggs or butter?” At Selina’s negative she closed the door, bolted it. Selina, standing there, basket on arm, could hear her heavy tread down the passageway toward the kitchen. Well, that was all right. Nothing so terrible about that, Selina told herself. Simply hadn’t wanted any vegetables. The next house. The next house, and the next, and the next. Up one side of the street, and down the other. Four times she refilled her basket. At one house she sold a quarter’s worth. Fifteen at another. Twenty cents here. Almost fifty there. “Good morning,” she always said at the door in her clear, distinct way. They stared, usually. But they were curious, too, and did not often shut the door in her face.

“Do you know of a good place?” one kitchen maid said. “This place ain’t so good. She only pays me three dollars. You can get four now. Maybe you know a lady wants a good girl.”

“No,” Selina answered. “No.”

At another house the cook had offered her a cup of coffee, noting the white face, the look of weariness. Selina refused it, politely. Twenty-first Street⁠—Twenty-fifth⁠—Twenty-eighth. She had over four dollars in her purse. Dirk was weary now and hungry to the point of tears. “The last house,” Selina promised him, “the very last one. After this one we’ll go home.” She filled her basket again. “We’ll have something to eat on the way, and maybe you’ll go to sleep with the canvas over you, high, fastened to the seat like a tent. And we’ll be home in a jiffy.”

The last house was a new gray stone one, already beginning to turn dingy from the smoke of the Illinois Central suburban trains that puffed along the lake front a block to the east. The house had large bow windows, plump and shining. There was a lawn, with statues, and a conservatory in the rear. Real lace curtains at the downstairs windows with plush hangings behind them. A high iron grille ran all about the property giving it an air of aloofness, of security. Selina glanced at this wrought-iron fence. And