Page:The Eleventh Virgin.pdf/15

THE ELEVENTH VIRGIN

Not long after this there was a great upheaval. The Henreddy family moved to the city where there were no vacant lots and brooks and houses with wide lawns around them. Instead there was a long tenement which stretched the entire length of a block. There were stores downstairs and above there were five-rooms flats and back of each flat there was a porch as big as a room. Each porch had a gate to it, and when June went outside the gate, there was a long passageway down which she could walk, staring in at the other porches—some of them with geraniums, and nasturtiums in boxes nailed to the railing, and swings hanging in the middle of the porches

For lunch there was always potato soup and for supper there were bananas, bread and butter and jelly and tea. June didn’t like tea and she didn’t like jelly. And she didn’t like being sent after the bananas “Get dead ripe ones,” her mother always said. “They ought to be only ten cents a