"Boys don't care," I rejoined with indifference, taking up my market basket.
She detained me with a glance. "There's one thing they care about—dreadfully," she said.
"No, there ain't."
Without replying in words she went over to the stove, and standing on tiptoe, gingerly removed a hot plum cake, small and round and shaped like a muffin, from the smoking oven.
"I reckon they care about plum cake," she remarked tauntingly, and as she held it toward me it smelt divinely.
But my pride was in arms, for I remembered the cup of milk she had refused disdainfully more than three years ago in our little kitchen.
"No, they don't," I replied with a stoicism that might have added lustre to a nobler cause.
In my heart I was hoping that she would drop the cake into my basket in spite of my protest, not only sparing my pride by an act of magnanimity, but allowing me at the same time the felicity of munching the plums on my way back to the Old Market. But the next moment, to my surprise and indignation, she took a generous bite of the very dainty she had offered me, making, while she ate it, provoking faces of a rapturous enjoyment.
I was lingering in the doorway with a scornful yet fascinated gaze on the diminishing cake, when the pink-turbaned cook, who had gone out to empty a basin of pea shells, entered and resumed her querulous abuse.
"De bes' thing you kin do is ter clear out," she said, "you en yo' car'ots. He ain' fit'n fur you ter tu'n yo' eyes on, honey," she added to the child, "en I don' reckon yo' ma would let yo' wipe yo' foot on 'im ef'n she 'uz alive. Yes'm, Miss Mitty, I'se a-comin'!"