“What did I tell you? I knew she would come,” she cried to her husband, who had hurried into the shop to wait on a customer. It was a delicatessen shop and very appetizing did the food look to poor Judy, who felt as though she had never eaten in her life.
“Tell me!” he exclaimed as he weighed out cooked spinach to a small child who wanted two sous’ worth. “Tell me, indeed! You said Mam’selle would not walk on the street with an old peasant in a faded blouse if she would come at all, and I—I said Mam’selle was what the Americans call a good sport and would walk on the street with an old peasant, if she liked him, in any kind of clothes he happened to be in, rags even. Bah! You were wrong and I was right.”
The old Tricots were forever wrangling but it was always in a semi-humorous manner, and their great devotion to each other was always apparent. Judy found it was better never to take sides with either one as the moment she did both of them were against her.
How homelike the little apartment was behind the shops! It consisted of two bed rooms, a living room which opened into the shop and a tiny tiled kitchen about the size of a kitchen on a dining car—so tiny that it seemed a miracle that all the food displayed so appetizingly in the windows and glass cases of the shop should have been prepared there.
“It is so good of you to have me and I want to come more than I can say, but you must let me board with you. I couldn’t stay unless you do.”
“That is as you choose, Mam’selle,” said the old woman. “We do not want to make money on you, but you can pay for your keep if you want to.”
“All right, Mother, but I must help some, help in the shop or mind the baby, clean up the apartment, anything! I can’t cook a little bit, but I can do other things.”
“No woman can cook,” asserted old Tricot. “They lack the touch.”
“Ah! Braggart! If I lay thee out with this pastry board, I’ll not lack the touch,” laughed the wife. She was making wonderful little tarts with crimped edges to be filled with assortments of confiture.
“Let me mind the shop, then. I know I can do that.”