“As it happens you’re luckier then you realize to get even a dollar a bushel from us. For at first the talk was in the office of paying you only ninety cents a bushel this year.”
“Oh, indeed!” Mrs. O’Mally was getting mad now, as her words and actions showed. “’Twas all decided in your office, was it? I had nothing to say in the matter at all.”
“Buying cucumbers is purely a matter of business with us. To make money we’ve got to buy right. Hence we set our own price.”
“An’ is it on the same plan that ye buy the bottles?”
“What do you mean?”
“Do ye say to the bottle man: ‘I’ll pay so much.’ Or does he set the price on his own goods?”
“That’s different.”
“Yes,” came bitterly, “the difference is that you’re dealin’ with a firm as smart as yourselves an’ not with a helpless ould woman.”
Smarty didn’t like that.
“Say!...” he swelled up. “We aren’t trying to cheat you. They’re your cucumbers, and you don’t have to sell them to us if you don’t want to.”