Cannon’s was the big cheap department store down near the station. Eleanor took mental note of the Ten’s opinion of its treatment of employees, and resolved to ask Mr. Thayer if the girls who worked there really had such a hard time as their small brothers thought. Meanwhile she stopped the ridiculous operation contest with many peanuts. The Ten, being very bright boys, though ignorant of books, had speedily discovered that the bigger numbers you could add right, the faster you could secure large quantities of peanuts. Also, they humbly worshipped the Lovely Lady, whom Rafael had refused to let them call “de peach.” They came regularly to their class, they listened spellbound to the adventures of Robin Hood, they wrote the names of Robin and all his band—also their own and the Lovely Lady’s—without a slip, and when Eleanor declared that nothing would make her so happy as to hear them read the tale of King Arthur and his knights to her out of a book, they set themselves at learning “dose queer book letters” with a will.
“First fellah dat bothers my Lovely Lada, I fixa him,” Rafael had announced at the end of the third lesson.
“Why she your lovely lada?” demanded Pietro mockingly, dodging behind a telegraph pole for safety.
“’Cause I lika her de most,” Rafael declared, “and she goan lika me de most. You jus’ wait.”
But after that one assertion of proprietorship, he changed “my” to “the,” and impressed the revision upon his friends and followers with terrible threats. Rafael’s eyes were brown and melting, his voice was of a liquid softness, his smile as sunny as the skies of his native land. But when he scowled all the fierceness of Sicilian feuds and vendettas flashed out of his deep eyes and straightened his mouth into a cruel, hard line. No wonder the Ten shivered and cowered before the wrath of Rafael, supplemented by the flash of a sharp little dagger that Eleanor, who had been entirely reassured by Mr. Thayer, little suspected the dearest of her dear, curly-haired comical Ten to be carrying inside his gray shirt.
After the class that evening, Eleanor asked Mr. Thayer about Cannon’s.
“Well, I suppose they are pretty hard on their girls,” he said. “Standing up all day waiting on tired, irritable customers who have to make every penny count, with fifteen minutes off for lunch in the busy season, can’t be exactly fun. Then in the evening I suppose they have to go back to straighten up their stock of goods, move things around to show them off better, trim up the windows, and so on. Christmas means something quite different from a gay holiday with a big dinner and a lot of pretty presents to those girls and to lots of others, Miss Watson. If the Christmas rush is bad at Cannon’s, it must be perfect torture in the big city shops.”
Next day Eleanor persuaded Madeline, who could always be detached from her work to investigate a real novelty, to go with her to Cannon’s.
“If we want to ask the clerks any questions, you can do it safely in Italian, or any other language,” Eleanor urged. “They’re mostly foreigners, I think.”
Madeline nodded. “And I might find the type——” Her voice trailed off into silence, and her face wore a far-away, inscrutable look. Writing a play for Miss Dwight certainly made a person very absent-minded, and one’s conversation very inconsecutive—also one’s actions. Madeline suddenly decided to buy a hat, and dragged Eleanor from one shop to another without finding anything to please her difficult taste, so that it was almost dark when they reached Cannon’s.