“That ain’t what I’m talking about, Ella. Rolfe Higgins is making himself I don’t know how much money, and the least it seems he could do is stay around and at least count it.”

Ella said “Yes’m” and glanced in the direction of the phone booth.

“That stuff he give me made things worse. This old stuff.” The woman took a bottle from her purse. “My eye is still hurting, and it’s all pooched out, too, just like it was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well, I am too.” She jerked her thumb. “Who’s that in the booth?”

“I don’t know,” Ella said. “A customer.”

“That’s what I mean,” the woman said. “He could rob the store and do the Lord can only say what else; a young girl like you all alone! I’ll talk to Rolfe, now, I’ll do that.”

Her voice went on, droning, and Ella smiled and nodded courteously, but she heard very little.

Then a deeper voice said, “Mabel, are you here again?”

“You’re doggone right I’m here again, Rolfe Higgins, and you can take this here ointment and throw it in the garbage. It don’t do no good at all.”

“Well,” said Mr. Higgins, a surprisingly slight man to own so profound a bass, “I told you to have it lanced.” He clicked his tongue. “Hello, Ella. Everything go all right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And a wonder, too,” the woman said. “I think it’s criminal for you to leave this little girl alone—”

The two began to argue, and Ella went back behind the counter and turned on the carbonated water dispenser so that she wouldn’t have to listen. Mrs. Dodge was an old grouse, a nasty, crotchety old grouse.

“—what if one of them niggers off of Simon’s Hill was to go by and see her, what would happen, do you suppose?”

“Not a thing, Mabel. We’ve got good nigras and you know it. Besides, they don’t ever come into town, and you know that, too.”

“Well, they’ll be coming down soon enough. You just wait: the minute they let them into the school, they’ll take over this place. You’ll have them sitting right up at your counter, asking to be served!”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so. I guess you never traveled much, then, that’s all I can say.”

“All right, Mabel. All right!”

They wrangled for almost ten minutes, then Mr. Higgins gave the woman a tube of zinc oxide and told her that it wouldn’t make the swelling go down on her eye, but that it would at least keep the germs away.

Mrs. Dodge remarked that he was a poor excuse for a pharmacist, a poor excuse, and exited.

Mr. Higgins glared after her. “The weaker sex,” he com­mented.

Ella nodded. “She certainly does get excited.”