"Now whatever do you want down here?" Dora demanded ungraciously.
"I wanted," Mark paused. He longed to say "some currants," but he had
failed before, and he substituted "a lump of sugar." The two women in
bonnets looked at him and nodded their heads and clicked their tongues.
"Did you ever?" said one.
"Fancy! A lump of sugar! Goodness gracious!"
"What a sweet tooth!" commented the first.
The sugar happened to be close to Dora's hand on the kitchen-table, and
she gave him two lumps with the command to "sugar off back upstairs as
fast as you like." The craving for sweetness was allayed; but when Mark
had crunched up the two lumps on the dark kitchen-stairs, he was as
lonely as he had been before he left the nursery. He wished now that he
had not eaten up the sugar so fast, that he had taken it back with him
to the nursery and eked it out to wile away this endless afternoon. The
prospect of going back to the nursery depressed him; and he turned aside
to linger in the dining-room whence there was a view of Lima Street,
down which a dirty frayed man was wheeling a barrow and shouting for
housewives to bring out their old rags and bottles and bones. Mark felt
the thrill of trade and traffick, and he longed to be big enough to open
the window and call out that he had several rags and bottles and bones
to sell; but instead he had to be content with watching two
self-important little girls chaffer on behalf of their mothers, and go
off counting their pennies.
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