For the first time, in she could not remember when, Marcia laughed aloud. Laughter was an unaccustomed sound on her lips. When she heard the tones of it, she was so shocked that she stopped abruptly as if she had committed an indiscretion.
“Yes,” she said, “I do know enough about business to run a place like this without the least difficulty. To tell the truth, I’ve had a lot of schooling on how business should be done to be successful. What have you been doing? Letting your customers take away your goods without paying for them, and now the bills are due, and you’ve no money to meet them?”
The woman nodded.
“Hm-m-m,” said Marcia. “Well, I could go out and collect all that I could pry out of people. I could clean up this place. Maybe I could convince your banker that he’d be safe in letting you have what you’d need to tide you over till we could get things started on a new and safe basis. Would you like to have me come in with you and try to help you into really prosperous business?”
Suddenly the little woman across the counter, clasping a pair of needle-roughened, shaking hands against her defrauded chest, looked with the beseeching eyes of a starving creature at the face of the woman opposite her.
“Oh, would you? Oh, would you, please?” she begged.
Marcia was taken unaware. She did not know that there was a soft place remaining in her heart capable of the response she felt herself making to that artless appeal.
“I certainly would,” she answered. “I’d be mighty glad for the chance. I don’t know a thing in the world about you. You don’t know a thing in the world about me. Shall we agree to take each other on trust, to ask no questions, but start from now together and see what we can make out of life?”
“I’d be tickled to death!” said the little woman, recklessly toppling preconceptions and precautions of a lifetime.
“Is there room for me here?” inquired Marcia.