"Why?" he asked.
"She cries, sir," the girl answered.
"Bring her to my office," he ordered.
Then he turned to me and explained: "The new ones don't assimilate readily. There is especial difficulty in the matter of food. Their taste has been spoiled with spicy food and they can't eat the simple, wholesome food we give them here. The first few days they don't eat at all, but when they get good and hungry they fall to it like the rest. And they eat—oh! they eat. If you could see the bills for food for a month you would gasp. A fortune is spent. The fruit bill alone is above three hundred dollars a month. They get all the fruits of the season, but they would prefer pickles and sour tomatoes. I tell you for some of them it's lucky their parents died. I shudder to think what would have become of them." As he was speaking the office girl called him to the telephone. I went straight to the child who refused to eat and asked her why she refused the food. It was the child of an applicant and she knew me.
"I can't eat it—it tastes bad. See for yourself."
I took a spoonful of the supposed lentil soup and tasted. It smelt and tasted like dishwater. Of lentils it had only the colour and the name. Then I tasted the meat and the pudding, and understood why they had to be hungry for a few days before they could touch it. I looked at the faces of the children. All ghastly pale, with bent shoulders and fallen-in chests and toothpick legs—only the eyes were living, the feverish, longing eyes of the people of woe.
The children ate the bread, some chewed a bone, alternating with a bite from a quarter of an apple, the fruit of the season, and as an extra treat, because I was there, two dates were given to each. Once in a while a little tragedy would happen. A big one would take away a slice of bread from a small one, and the protests of the robbed were stilled with threats and pinches.
"When is your happiest time here?" I asked one of the girls.
"Every six weeks," she answered.