Explore "The Eleventh Virgin" by Dorothy Day on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Every few months Mother Grace and the children's father had a house party and that meant the horse-chestnut tree in the back garden would have an outcropping of nickels and dimes. They grew in the branches and were hidden among the leaves and twigs around the trunk. The boys could climb for them, but June had to burrow around the roots of the tree. She was only four then.
There was a convenient ledge all around underneath the kitchen table where the children ate supper and they hid their crusts there. Sometimes they were able to slip away unsuspected from the supper table and sometimes Mary Milady, the "girl," went around and scooped up the crusts and made them eat them before they went out to play "run, sheepy, run. " The disadvantage of that was that the crusts got mixed up and one had to eat them indiscriminately. June being a finicky child much preferred to eat her own.