"It's a lie; it's a lie!" the boy heard his mother cry out, as the girl behind the counter told her tale. "If I didn't pay for them it was because I forgot. Here's the money. I'll pay for them now. What do you take me for?"
"No; you won't pay for them now. That's not the way we do business. Just come along this way."
"I'm not going nowheres else. If you won't take the money you can go without it. Leave me alone, and let me take my little boy home."
Her voice had the screaming helplessness of women in the grasp of forces without pity. A floorwalker laid his hand on her shoulder, compelling her to turn round.
"Don't you touch me," she shouted. "If I've got to go anywheres I can go without your tearing the clothes off my back, can't I?"
For the little boy it was the last touch of humiliation. Rushing at the floorwalker, he kicked him in the shins.
"Don't you hit my mudda. I won't let you."
A second floorwalker held the youngster back. Some of the crowd laughed. Others declared it a monstrous thing that women of the sort should have such fine-looking children.
Presently they were surging through the crowd again, toward a back region of the premises. The boy, not crying but panting as if spent by a long race, held his mother by the skirt; on the other side one of the forceful women had her by the arm. He saw that his mother's hat had been knocked to one side, and that a mesh of her dark hair had broken loose. He remembered this picture, and how the shoppers, wherever they passed, made a lane for them, shocked by the sight of their disgrace.