United States or Mozambique ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I'm going to take a plate of bean soup and fit it over Ma Fike's head upside down." "Oh, give Ma Fike a rest!" Una was uneasy. She wasn't sure whether this repartee was friendly good spirits or a nagging feud. Like all the ungrateful human race, she considered whether she ought to have identified herself with the noisy Esther Lawrence on entering the Home.
"I didn't quite " "Miss or Mrs., I said. Can't you understand English?" "See here, I'm not being sent to jail that I know of!" Una rose, tremblingly. Mrs. Fike merely waited and snapped: "Sit down. You look as though you had enough sense to understand that we can't let people we don't know anything about enter a decent place like this.... Miss or Mrs., I said?"
Fike knew it; as though a large policeman were secreted behind the desk and would at any moment pop out and drag her off to jail. She answered with tremorous carefulness. By now, the one thing that she wanted to do was to escape from that Christian and strictly supervised Napoleon, Mrs. Fike, and flee back to the Grays. "Previous history?" Mrs.
"My dear young lady, the first consideration isn't to 'have somebody show you' or anybody else a room, but to ascertain if you are a fit person to come here." Mrs. Fike jabbed at a compartment of her desk, yanked out a corduroy-bound book, boxed its ears, slammed it open, glared at Una in a Christian and Homelike way, and began to shoot questions: "Whatcha name?" "Una Golden." "Miss uh Miss?"
She would "show her"; she would "come and live here just for spite." What Mrs. Fike thought has not been handed down. She led Una past a series of closets, each furnished with two straight chairs on either side of a table, a carbon print of a chilly-looking cathedral, and a slice of carpet on which one was rather disappointed not to find the label, "Bath Mat."
Then there's a third section that thinks she's merely institutionalized training makes her as hard as any other kind of a machine. You'll find lots like her in this town in all the charities." "But the girls they do have a good time here?" "Yes, they do. It's sort of fun to fight Ma Fike and all the fool rules. I enjoy smoking here twice as much as I would anywhere else.
And Fike isn't half as bad as the board of visitors bunch of fat, rich, old Upper-West-Siders with passementeried bosoms, doing tea-table charity, and asking us impertinent questions, and telling a bunch of hard-worked slaves to be virtuous and wash behind their ears the soft, ignorant, conceited, impractical parasites!
And they were "requested to answer all reasonable questions of matron, or board of visitors, or duly qualified inspectors, regarding moral, mental, physical, and commercial well-being and progress." Una couldn't resist asking, "I suppose it isn't forbidden to sleep in our rooms, is it?" Mrs. Fike looked over her, through her, about her, and remarked: "I'd advise you to drop all impudence.
Fike was grimly continuing, and she followed this question by ascertaining Una's ambitions, health, record for insanity, and references. Mrs. Fike closed the query-book, and observed: "Well, you are rather fresh, but you seem to be acceptable and now you may look us over and see whether we are acceptable to you.
Harriet Fike, the matron of the Home. Mrs. Fike had a brown, stringy neck and tan bangs. She wore a mannish coat and skirt, flat shoes of the kind called "sensible" by everybody except pretty women, and a large silver-mounted crucifix. "Well?" she snarled. "Some one I'd like to find out about coming here to live to see the place, and so on. Can you have somebody show me one of the rooms?"
Word Of The Day