Daisy and Elsie found themselves the only visible occupants of an interior unexampled in their previous experience. Along one side of the room, from wall to wall, there ran what they took to be a counter for the display of goods, though it had nothing upon it except a blackened little jar of matches and a short thick glass goblet, dimmed at the bottom with an ancient sediment. A brass rail extended along the base of the counter, and on the wall, behind, was a long mirror, once lustrous, no doubt, but now coated with a white substance that had begun to suffer from soot. Upon the wall opposite the mirror there were two old lithographs, one of a steamboat, the other of a horse and jockey; and there were some posters advertising cigarettes, but these decorations completed the invoice of all that was visible to the shoppers.
“Oh, dear!” Daisy said. “Wouldn’t it be too provoking if they’d gone to lunch or somep’m!” And she tapped as loudly as she could upon the counter, calling: “Here! Somebody come an’ wait on us! I want to look at some of your nicest unb’eached muslin an’ some orstrich feathers.”
There was a door at the other end of the room and it stood open, revealing a narrow and greasy passage, with decrepit walls that showed the laths, here and there, where areas of plaster had fallen. “I guess I better go call in that little hallway,” said Daisy. “They don’t seem to care how long they keep their customers waitin’!”
But as she approached the door, the sound of several muffled explosions came from the rear of the building and reached the shoppers through the funnel of the sinister passage.
“That’s funny,” said Daisy. “I guess somebody’s shootin’ off firecrackers back there.”
“What for?” Elsie asked.
“I guess they think it must be the Fourth o’ July,” Daisy answered; and she called down the passageway: “Here! Come wait on us. We want to look at some unb’eached muslin an’ orstrich feathers. Can’t you hurry up?”
No one replied, but voices became audible, approaching;—voices in simultaneous outbursts, and manifesting such poignant emotion that although there were only two of them, a man’s and a woman’s, Daisy and Elsie at first supposed that seven or eight people were engaged in the controversy. For a moment they also supposed the language to be foreign, but discovered that some of the expressions used were familiar, though they had been accustomed to hear them under more decorous circumstances.
“They’re makin’ an awful fuss,” Elsie said. “What are they talkin’ about?”
“The way it sounds,” said Daisy, “it sounds like they’re talkin’ about things in the Bible.”