Beggars Choice

Martha crossed her arms. "I don't see you working for it." She said, frowning at the greasy man in the torn linens. Every morning, she got up at dawn to open the stall, put down the firewood, start the fire, and load the heavy cast iron pot full of vegetables during the wee hours of the morning. While that cooked, she tidied up the stall, started bread baking in the oven and then worked on various other chores. She wasn't a large cook, in an established shop, she was just one of a dozen street stalls that's only protection from the sun was a canvass tent cloth. The man was a beggar. He'd barely gotten two coppers together, and he was begging her to give her some of the delicious smelling soup for free.

"Please, miss, just a taste?"

"You're dirty and you're scaring off the actual customers." She said, eyes narrowed. "And I don't have enough of those to suit my tastes."

"I'll tell them how wonderful the soup is if I can just taste it." He offered.

"What are they going to trust a street beggar's tastes for?" She asked. "They'll just think anything sounds tasty to you."

"Well, then I'll be too busy eating soup to bother them?"

She laughed. "Or perhaps you might go and bother someone else?"

"Not likely, miss." He said, clasping his empty stomach.

Martha saw then that she had no choice. She would either give him the soup or he'd bother her all day and continue to scare off her customers. She chewed on her lip. She was a hard worker because she wanted more than just surviving, she wanted to profit. She wanted to become one of those swanky shop owners. She wanted access to better spices, and better pots and actual kitchens. She took a deep breath, and smiled at him. "I don't give people food for nothing, because I don't get anything for nothing." She said. "What you can do is go beg people on the street to buy you my soup. You'll likely get more people to do that since they know it will get you fed instead of drunk." She smirked. With any luck at all, all the begging for her soup would attract those who would want to come taste it themselves. If nothing else, at least he'd be fed out of the pocket of someone else, not hers.

So, he went off into the crowd. She went about her day, rolling out small dough balls and putting into that chopped vegetables and small slivers of meat and spices. By evening, at least twenty people had come to buy the beggar some soup. He came back hungry, none of them had come back. She poured him a bowl.