The only use my advice is to Bee is to fasten her on to the opposite
thing. She says I help her to decide because I am always wrong.
"Now will you keep Billy away and excuse me to all visitors, and don't
come near my door for three hours and send my luncheon up at one
o'clock, and _don't send after the tray_! Leave it there until I have
finished writing."
"It is so untidy," murmured Bee.
"Well, who will see it?"
I am one of those who cleanse the outside of the desk and the bureau.
"Now, Billy, my precious, if you will keep away from Tattah all the
morning, I will give you some candy directly after dinner. You will
find it on the sconce just where I always put it," I said.
The sconce is where Billy and I put things for each other. He is only
three and a half--"thrippence, ha'penny," he says if you ask him, but
beguiling--oh, as beguiling as Cleopatra, or the serpent in the Garden
of Eden, or--or as his mother!
Billy and I went to look at the sconce on my way up-stairs, and he
called me back twice, saying, "Tattah, I want to kiss you," which I
could but feel was something due to the promised candy on the sconce.
I sat down and began to write:
_Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie at Canterbury_.
Mrs. Jimmie, having been presented at the Court of St. James, always
has more to do in London than she can attend to. As Jimmie hates
functions with all the hatred of the American business man who looks
upon gloves as for warmth only, this leaves Jimmie and me to roam
around London at will. Mrs. Jimmie loathes the top of a "'bus" and
absolutely draws the line at "The Cheshire Cheese." She lunches at
Scott's and dines at the Savoy, while Jimmie and I are never so happy
as in the grill-room at the Trocadero or in a hansom, threading the
mazes of the City, bound for a plate of beefsteak pie at "The Cheshire
Cheese" or on top of a 'bus on Saturday night, going through the
Whitechapel region, creepy with horrors of "Jack the Ripper."
"What in all the world is a beefsteak pie?" she asked us, when she
heard our unctuous exclamations.
"Why, it is a huge meat pie, made out of ham and larks and pigeons and
beef, with a delicious gravy or sauce and a divine pastry. And you eat
it in a little old kitchen with a sanded floor and deal tables, and
where the bread is cut in chunks and where the steins are so thick that
it is like drinking your beer over a stone wall, and where Dr. Samuel
Johnson used to sit so often that the oil from his hair has made a
lovely dirty spot on the wall, and they have it under glass with a
tablet to his memory, so that if you like you can go and kneel down and
worship before it, with your knees grinding into the sand of the
floor," I said.
"Dear me," said Mrs. Jimmie, faintly. "Couldn't they have cleaned it
off?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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