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

it seemed to bar her out. There was something forbidding about it⁠—menacing. She was tired, that was it. The last house. She had almost five dollars, earned in the last hour. “Just five minutes,” she said to Dirk, trying to make her tone bright, her voice gay. Her arms full of vegetables which she was about to place in the basket at her feet she heard at her elbow:

“Now, then, where’s your license?”

She turned. A policeman at her side. She stared up at him. How enormously tall, she thought; and how red his face. “License?”

“Yeh, you heard me. License. Where’s your peddler’s license? You got one, I s’pose.”

“Why, no. No.” She stared at him, still.

His face grew redder. Selina was a little worried about him. She thought, stupidly, that if it grew any redder⁠—

“Well, say, where d’ye think you are, peddlin’ without a license! A good mind to run you in. Get along out of here, you and the kid. Leave me ketch you around here again!”

“What’s the trouble, Officer?” said a woman’s voice. A smart open carriage of the type known as a victoria, with two chestnut horses whose harness shone with metal. Spanking, was the word that came to Selina’s mind, which was acting perversely certainly; crazily. A spanking team. The spankers disdainfully faced Selina’s comic bony nags which were grazing the close-cropped grass that grew in the neat little lawn-squares between curb and sidewalk. “What’s the trouble, Reilly?”

The woman stepped out of the victoria. She wore a black silk Eton suit, very modish, and a black hat with a plume.

“Woman peddling without a license, Mrs. Arnold. You got to watch ’em like a hawk.⁠ ⁠… Get along wid you, then.” He put a hand on Selina’s shoulder and gave her a gentle push.

There shook Selina from head to foot such a passion, such a storm of outraged sensibilities, as to cause street, victoria, silk-clad woman, horses, and policeman to swim and shiver in a haze before her eyes. The rage of a fastidious woman who had had an alien male hand put upon her. Her face was white. Her eyes glowed black, enormous. She seemed tall, majestic even.

“Take your hand off me!” Her speech was clipped, vibrant. “How dare you touch me! How dare you! Take your hand!⁠—” The blazing eyes in the white mask. He took his hand from her shoulder. The red surged into her face. A tanned weather-beaten toil-worn woman, her abundant hair skewered into a knob and held by a long gray-black hairpin, her full skirt grimed with the mud of the wagon wheel, a pair of old side-boots on her slim feet, a grotesquely battered old felt hat (her husband’s) on her head, her arms full of ears of sweet corn, and carrots, and radishes and bunches of beets; a woman with bad teeth, flat breasts⁠—even then Julie had known her by her eyes. And she had stared and then run to her in her silk dress and her plumed hat, crying, “Oh, Selina! My dear! My dear!” with a sob of horror and pity. “My dear!” And had taken Selina, carrots, beets, corn, and radishes in her arms. The vegetables lay scattered all about them on the sidewalk in front of Julie Hempel Arnold’s great stone house on Prairie Avenue. But strangely enough it had been Selina who had done the comforting, patting Julie’s plump silken shoulder and saying, over and over, soothingly, as to a child, “There, there! It’s all right, Julie. It’s all right. Don’t cry. What’s there to cry for! Sh-sh! It’s all right.”

Julie lifted her head in its modish black plumed hat, wiped her eyes, blew her nose. “Get along with you, do,” she said to Reilly, the policeman, using his very words to Selina. “I’m going to report you to Mr. Arnold, see if I don’t. And you know what that means.”

“Well, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am, I was only doing my duty. How cud I know the lady was a friend of yours. Sure, I⁠—” He surveyed Selina, cart, jaded horses, wilted vegetables. “Well, how cud I, now, Mrs. Arnold, ma’am!”

“And why not!” demanded Julie with superb unreasonableness. “Why not, I’d like to know. Do get along with you.”

He got along, a defeated officer of the law, and a bitter. And now it was Julie who surveyed Selina, cart, Dirk, jaded horses, wilted leftover vegetables. “Selina, whatever in the world! What are you doing with⁠—” She caught sight of Selina’s absurd boots then and she began to cry again. At that Selina’s overwrought nerves snapped and she began to laugh, hysterically. It frightened Julie, that laughter. “Selina, don’t! Come in the house with me. What are you laughing at! Selina!”

With shaking finger Selina was pointing at the vegetables that lay tumbled at her feet. “Do you see that cabbage, Julie? Do you remember how I used to despise Mrs. Tebbitt’s because she used to have boiled cabbage on Monday nights?”

“That’s nothing to laugh at, is it? Stop laughing this minute, Selina Peake!”

“I’ll stop. I’ve stopped now. I was just laughing at my ignorance. Sweat and blood and health and youth go into every cabbage. Did you know that, Julie? One doesn’t despise them as food, knowing that.⁠ ⁠… Come, climb down, Dirk. Here’s a lady mother used to know⁠—oh, years and years ago, when she was a girl. Thousands of years ago.”

XII

The best thing for Dirk. The best thing for Dirk. It was the phrase that repeated itself over and over in Selina’s speech during the days that followed. Julie Arnold was all for taking him into her gray stone house, dressing him like Lord Fauntleroy and sending him to the north-side private school attended by Eugene, her boy, and Pauline, her girl. In this period of bewilderment and fatigue Julie had attempted to take charge of Selina much as she had done a dozen years before at the time of Simeon Peake’s dramatic death. And now, as then, she pressed into service her wonder-working father and