Friday, April 6, 2012
But if your name happened to be Daisy
But if your name happened to be Daisy, and you worked in an Eighth
Avenue candy store and lived in a little cold hall bedroom, five
feet by eight, and earned $6 per week, and ate ten-cent lunches
and were nineteen years old, and got up at 6:30 and worked till 9,
and never had studied philosophy, maybe things wouldn't look
that way to you from the top of a skyscraper.
Two sighed for the hand of Daisy, the unphilosophical. One was
Joe, who kept the smallest store in New York. It was about the
size of a tool-box of the D. P. W., and was stuck like a swallow's
nest against a corner of a down-town skyscraper. Its stock
consisted of fruit, candies, newspapers, song books, cigarettes, and
lemonade in season. When stern winter shook his congealed locks
and Joe had to move himself and the fruit inside, there was exactly
room in the store for the proprietor, his wares, a stove the size
of a vinegar cruet, and one customer.
Joe was not of the nation that keeps us forever in a furore with
fugues and fruit. He was a capable American youth who was
laying by money, and wanted Daisy to help him spend it. Three
times he had asked her.
"I got money saved up, Daisy," was his love song; "and you know
how bad I want you. That store of mine ain't very big, but--"
"Oh, ain't it?" would be the antiphony of the unphilosophical one.
"Why, I heard Wanamaker's was trying to get you to sublet part of
your floor space to them for next year."
Daisy passed Joe's corner every morning and evening.
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