Here, as she passed along, fat Jewish women held up flimsy silk stockings to her view, screaming, “Buy, Miss, buy now! The price goes up! Cheap! Cheap!” Here a man seized her rudely by the shoulder, turned her half around and all but shoved her into a narrow shop, where gaudy dresses were displayed. This made her angry. She wanted to fight.
“I fight?” She laughed softly to herself. “I, who have always lived in Camden Center! A sort of madness comes over one in such a place as this, I guess.” Recalling her fight earlier in the day, her cheeks crimsoned, and she hurried on.
“What a jumble!” she exclaimed aloud as she turned her attention once more to Maxwell Street. “Shoes, scissors, radios, geese, cabbages, rags and more rags, rusty hardware, musical instruments. Where does it all come from, and who will buy it?”
She paused to look at a crate of cute white puppies with pink noses. They, too, were for sale. Then, of a sudden, her face clouded.
“Can I do it?” she muttered. “Can I? I—I must! But other people’s things? So often the little treasures they prized! How can I?”
That she might remove her thoughts from a painful subject, she forced her eyes to take in her present surroundings. Then, with a little cry, she sprang forward. “Books! ‘Everything in books.’” She read the sign aloud. She disappeared through a dingy door into a room which was brightly lighted. The lights and the face that greeted her changed all. The madly fantastic world was, for the moment, quite shut out. She was at home with many books and with a girl whose face shone, she told herself, “like the sun.”
“A book?” this sales girl smiled. “Something entertaining? A novel, perhaps. Oh no, I don’t think you’d like ‘Portrait of a Man with Red Hair.’ It’s really rather terrible. One of the chief characters is a mad man who loves torturing people.” The girl shuddered.
“But this now—” She took up a well-thumbed volume. “‘A Lantern in Her Hand.’ It is truly lovely—the story of brave and simple people. I’m afraid we’re neither very brave nor very simple these days. Do you feel that we are?”
“She really is able to think clearly,” Grace whispered to herself. “I am sure I am going to like her.”
“I’ll take one, that one,” she said putting out her hand for the book. And then, because she was alone in a great city, because she was bursting to confide in someone, she said, “He buys trunks, trunks full of other people’s things. He takes the things out and sells them, other people’s things. They packed them away with such care, and now—now he takes them out, throws them about and sells them!”