"'I thought you didn't,' says I. 'Us ladies of Sodality have all thought it over an' over again: That you don't know stealing when you see it. No, nor not even when you've done it. Come here, Silas Sykes!' I says.
"I whipped by him into the store, and he followed me, sheer through being dazed, and keeping still through being knocked dumb.
"'Look here,' I says, 'here's your counter of bakery stuff—put in to take from Abagail, but no matter about that now. Where do you get it? From the City, with the label stuck on. What's the bakery like where you buy it? It's under a sidewalk and dust dirty, and I happen to know you know it. And look at the bread—not a thing over it, flies promenadin' on the crust, and you counting out change on an apple-pie the other day—I see you do it. Look at your dates, all uncovered and dirt from the street sticking to them like the pattern. Look at your fly-paper, hugged up against your dried-fruit box that's standing wide open. Look at you keeping fish and preserved fruit and canned stuff that you know is against the law—going to start keeping the law quick as you get these sold out, ain't you, Silas? Look at your stuff out there in front, full of street dirt and flies and ready to feed folks. And you keepin' the Ten Commandments like an old sheep—and being a church elder, and you might better climb porches and bust open safes. I s'pose you wonder what I'm sayin' all this to you for?'
"'No, ma'am,' says Silas, like the edge o' something, 'I don't wonder at your sayin' anything to anybody.'
"'I've got more to say,' I says, dry. 'I've only give you a sample. An' the place I'm goin' to say it is The Friendship Village Evening Daily, Extra, to-night, in a descriptive write-up of you and your store. I thought it might interest you to know.'
"'It's libel—it's libel!' says Silas, arms waving.
"'All right,' says I, liberating a fly accidentally caught on a date. 'Who you going to sue? Your wife, that's the editor? And everybody else's wife, that's doing the same thing to every behind-the-times dealer in town?'
"Silas hung on to that straw.
"'Be they doin' it to the others, too?' he asks.