Happy Pollyooly: The Rich Little Poor GirlJepson, Edgar
General
Happy Pollyooly: The Rich Little Poor Girl
Jepson, Edgar
England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Girls -- Fiction
For a while she observed his fashion of doing so with pain and dismay.
He put his clothes in the portmanteau anyhow and crushed them firmly
down. Sometimes he stood on them, quietly.
Standing painfully now on one leg and now on the other, she endured the
sight for several minutes; then she said:
"Oh please, sir: you'd better let me do it."
"Why? What's wrong with my way of doing it?" said the Honourable John
Ruffin, looking down at the confused mess with some surprise.
"Look how you're crumpling your shirts, sir," said Pollyooly.
"I thought that that was what trunks and portmanteaux were for. But
have it your own way. Deal with it yourself," said the Honourable John
Ruffin with airy indifference.
He lighted another cigar and watched Pollyooly take the clothes out of
the portmanteau and replace them neatly with some regard to their shape
and the space to be filled, finding room for a dozen things which he
had been forced to leave out. Then, when she had filled half the
portmanteau, he said:
"Always fresh accomplishments, Mrs. Bride. If you go on at this rate,
you will certainly go down to posterity as the Admirable Pollyooly."
He sent down to the Inner Temple kitchen for his lunch; and Pollyooly
gave the Lump his dinner. She ate little herself; she was too excited.
They drove, proudly, in a taxicab to Cannon Street Station; and they
travelled, proudly, first-class.
The Honourable John Ruffin had bought picture papers for the two
children and a novel for himself, and now and again he paused in his
reading to observe them. It was always a pleasure to a man of his
aesthetic sensibility to gaze at Pollyooly's angel face in its frame of
beautiful red hair and at that redder-headed but authentic cherub, the
Lump. As they ran through London, curiously curled round the Lump, she
was busy showing him the pictures in the papers and receiving his
monosyllabic comments on them, with the ecstatic delight with which his
disciples receive, or should receive, the pregnant utterances of a
genius. When they came into the country she was busy pointing out to
him, with an even more excited delight the common railside objects. It
was more than a year since he had been in the country; and he had to be
told earnestly and more than once that a cow was a cow and a sheep a
baa-lamb, for he was inclined to class them all alike under the genus
gee-gee. When at last he did correctly hail a sheep as a baa-lamb, the
triumphant pleasure of Pollyooly passed all bounds.
The Honourable John Ruffin read and observed the children, and observed
the children and read. But when they were nearing their journey's end,
he shut up his book and said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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