Nothing much. The Quaker lady had been again for sugar. Again Mrs. Day had unconditionally pledged herself that the canes from which it had been derived had not been grown by slaves.
"And have they?" Deleah asked.
"I'm sure, my dear, I don't know if they have or they haven't," a harassed grocer-woman acknowledged. Her conscience was becoming blunted in the stress and strain of business life. "She took a pound of it as usual, and that's all I can say about it."
"But, mama! For the sake of the profit on a pound of sugar!"
"There's no profit on it at all, Bessie. If she had taken a quarter of a pound of tea with it there would have been three-ha'pence into our pockets. But she did not. So you see I perjured myself for nothing."
"Don't let the thought trouble you for an instant, ma'am," Mr. Gibbon advised. "None of us can afford to be too nice in trade. We've got to live, Miss Bessie. Customers don't think so—they'd skin us if they could—but we have. I'm of Mr. Boult's mind on that subject, although there isn't much I uphold him in. 'Let us do our best for the public while it pays reasonable prices,' he says, 'and when it won't, let us do the public.'"
"All that is so low, Mr. Gibbon."
"But it's business, Miss Bessie. Business is low."
"Oh, don't let us talk about it now," Deleah pleads.
"Deleah has a secret. She's dying to tell us all," Deleah's mother said.