The bell rang again. Billy went out to talk with Granny, leaving Maida alone to cope with her first strange customer.
Again her heart began to jump into her throat. Her mouth felt dry on the inside. She watched the door, fascinated.
On the threshold two little girls were standing. They were exactly of the same size, they were dressed in exactly the same way, their faces were as alike as two peas in a pod. Maida saw at once that they were twins. They had little round, chubby bodies, bulging out of red sweaters; little round, chubby faces, emerging from tall, peaky, red-worsted caps. They had big round eyes as expressionless as glass beads and big round golden curls as stiff as candles. They stared so hard at Maida that she began to wonder nervously if her face were dirty.
“Come in, little girls,” she called.
The little girls pattered over to the show case and looked in. But their big round eyes, instead of examining the candy, kept peering up through the glass top at Maida. And Maida kept peering down through it at them.
“I want to buy some candy for a cent,” one of them whispered in a timid little voice.
“I want to buy some candy for a cent, too,” the other whispered in a voice, even more timid.
“All the cent candy is in this case,” Maida explained, smiling.
“What are you going to have, Dorothy?” one of them asked.
“I don’t know. What are you going to have, Mabel?” the other answered. They discussed everything in the one-cent case. Always they talked in whispers. And they continued to look more often at Maida than at the candy.