“Jerry, ol’ pal, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or knock on your system, but I’ve got a hunch that your selling spiel needs polishing up. It’s—— Well, to use the soap peddler’s expression, it isn’t artistic. It lacks tact.” [[61]]
That made me hot.
“I hope that she doesn’t get rheumatism in her arms,” I shot at him, “when she starts after you with her broom.”
I watched him saunter down the farmhouse lane. Then I sat down on a big rock and waited for Mrs. Goliath to get into high gear with her broom. My head hurt something fierce. But I grinned, notwithstanding. Oh, boy, how I grinned! He’d catch it. I was glad. For he was acting altogether too chesty. He needed taking down a peg or two. [[62]]
CHAPTER VII
WHAT SCOOP DID
I imagined that I could feel the bump on my head getting bigger and bigger as I sat on the rock with my cap in my lap and my four boxes of Mr. Gallywiggle’s beauty soap in my cap.
And when I thought of how the bump came to be there, so big and painful, I said to myself, in just anger over Mrs. Pederson’s unwarranted attack, that I hoped that she would get her pay for banging me up.
For one thing, I hoped that she would become homelier and homelier. She could become as homely as an old mud fence and I wouldn’t let her have a single cake of my beauty soap. No, I wouldn’t! She could stay homely for the next million years for all I cared. I’d let some other woman have my soap to get beautiful with—some deserving woman who was kind to boys and used them in the way that boys should be used—good boys, I mean, like myself.