"You fool! I hate you! You're no damn good!" she cried passionately.
With a cruel pleasure in the action, I beat her on the back. She began
to sob.
Then we walked on a space. And we sat down together on the crest of a
hill. My mood changed, and I held her close to me, with one arm flung
about her, till she quietened down from her sobbing. I was full of a
power I had never known before.
* * * * *
I have told of the big, double house my grandmother had for renting, and
how she might have made a good living renting it out, if she had used a
little business sense ... but now she let the whole of it to a caravan
of gypsies for their winter quarters,--who, instead of paying rent,
actually held her and Millie in _their_ debt by reading their palms,
sometimes twice a day ... I think it was my Uncle Joe who at last ousted
them....
* * * * *
When I came back from Aunt Rachel's I found a voluble, fat, dirty, old,
yellow-haired tramp established in the ground floor of the same house.
He had, in the first place, come to our back door to beg a hand-out.
And, sitting on the doorstep and eating, and drinking coffee, he had
persuaded my grandmother that if she would give him a place to locate on
credit he knew a way to clear a whole lot of money. His project for
making money was the selling of home-made hominy to the restaurants up
in town.
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