And the Yeah, Welcome back everyone to 1001 classic short stories and tales.

Today's story for one of our favorite authors, O Henry,

is called A Lickpenny Lover.

And now our story.

There were 3,000 girls in the biggest store.

Maisie was one of them. She was 18 and a sales lady in the Jents Gloves Department.

Here she became versed in two varieties of human beings, the kind

of gents who buy their gloves in department stores, and the kind of women who buy gloves for

unfortunate gents. Besides this wide knowledge of the human species, Maisie had acquired

other information. She had listened to the promulgated wisdom of the 2,999 other girls and had stored it in a brain that was as secretive and wary as that of a Maltese cat.

Perhaps nature, foreseeing that she would lack wise counselors, had mingled the saving ingredient of shrewdness

along with her beauty, as she has endowed the silver fox of the priceless fur above the other

animals with cunning.

For Maisie was beautiful.

She was a deep-tended blonde with the calm poise of a lady who cooks buttercags in a window. And as you closed your band over the tape line for your glove measure you

thought of the goddess Hebei and as you looked again you wondered how she had

come by Minerva's eyes. When the floor walker was not looking, Maisie chewed tuty,

When he was looking, she gazed up as if at the clouds and smiled wistfully.

That is the shop girl's smile, and I enjoy you to shun it unless you are well fortified with the

colacity of the heart, caramels, and a congeniality for the capers of Cupid. This smile belonged to Maisie's recreation hours and not to the store, but the floor walker must have his own.

He is the Shylock of the stores. When he comes nosing around, the bridge of his nose is a

toll bridge. It is goo-goo eyes or get when he looks toward a pretty girl. Of course, not all

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