style="font-size:15px;"> “Yes, just folks, I mean. Anybody – everybody.”
“Well, no, Pollyanna, I can’t say that I do,” replied Mrs. Carew, coldly, her brows contracted.
Mrs. Carew’s eyes had lost their twinkle. They were turned rather mistrustfully, indeed, on Pollyanna. To herself Mrs. Carew was saying: “Now for preachment number one, I suppose, on my duty to mix with my fellow-men, à la Sister Della!”
“Don’t you? Oh, I do,” sighed Pollyanna. “They’re all so nice and so different, you know. And down here there must be such a lot of them to be nice and different. Oh, you don’t know how glad I am so soon that I came! I knew I would be, anyway, just as soon as I found out you were YOU – that is, Miss Wetherby’s sister, I mean. I love Miss Wetherby, so I knew I should you, too; for of course you’d be alike – sisters, so – even if you weren’t twins like Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Peck – and they weren’t quite alike, anyway, on account of the wart. But I reckon you don’t know what I mean, so I’ll tell you.”
And thus it happened that Mrs. Carew, who had been steeling herself for a preachment on social ethics, found herself, much to her surprise and a little to her discomfiture, listening to the story of a wart on the nose of one Mrs. Peck, Ladies’ Aider.
By the time the story was finished the limousine had turned into Commonwealth Avenue, and Pollyanna immediately began to exclaim at the beauty of a street which had such a “lovely big long yard all the way up and down through the middle of it,” and which was all the nicer, she said, “after all those little narrow streets.”
“Only I should think every one would want to live on it,” she commented enthusiastically.
“Very likely; but that would hardly be possible,” retorted Mrs. Carew, with uplifted eyebrows.
Pollyanna, mistaking the expression on her face for one of dissatisfaction that her own home was not on the beautiful Avenue, hastened to make amends[18].
“Why, no, of course not,” she agreed. “And I didn’t mean that the narrower streets weren’t just as nice,” she hurried on; “and even better, maybe, because you could be glad you didn’t have to go so far when you wanted to run across the way to borrow eggs or soda, and – Oh, but DO you live here?” she interrupted herself, as the car came to a stop before the imposing Carew doorway. “Do you live here, Mrs. Carew?”
“Why, yes, of course I live here,” returned the lady, with just a touch of irritation.
“Oh, how glad, GLAD you must be to live in such a perfectly lovely place!” exulted the little girl, springing to the sidewalk and looking eagerly about her. “Aren’t you glad?”
Mrs. Carew did not reply. With unsmiling lips and frowning brow she was stepping from the limousine.
For the second time in five minutes, Pollyanna hastened to make amends.
“Of course I don’t mean the kind of glad that’s sinfully proud,” she explained, searching Mrs. Carew’s face with anxious eyes. “Maybe you thought I did, same as Aunt Polly used to, sometimes. I don’t mean the kind that’s glad because you’ve got something somebody else can’t have; but the kind that just – just makes you want to shout and yell and bang doors, you know, even if it isn’t proper[19],” she finished, dancing up and down on her toes.
The chauffeur turned his back precipitately, and busied himself with the car. Mrs. Carew, still with unsmiling lips and frowning brow led the way up the broad stone steps.
“Come, Pollyanna,” was all she said, crisply.
It was five days later that Della Wetherby received the letter from her sister, and very eagerly she tore it open. It was the first that had come since Pollyanna’s arrival in Boston.
“My dear Sister,” Mrs. Carew had written. “For pity’s sake, Della, why didn’t you give me some sort of an idea what to expect from this child you have insisted upon my taking? I’m nearly wild – and I simply can’t send her away. I’ve tried to three times, but every time, before I get the words out of my mouth, she stops them by telling me what a perfectly lovely time she is having, and how glad she is to be here, and how good I am to let her live with me while her Aunt Polly has gone to Germany. Now how, pray, in the face of that, can I turn around and say ‘Well, won’t you please go home; I don’t want you’? And the absurd part of it is, I don’t believe it has ever entered her head that I don’t WANT her here; and I can’t seem to make it enter her head, either.
“Of course if she begins to preach, and to tell me to count my blessings, I SHALL send her away. You know I told you, to begin with, that I wouldn’t permit that. And I won’t. Two or three times I have thought she was going to (preach, I mean), but so far she has always ended up with some ridiculous story about those Ladies’ Aiders of hers; so the sermon gets sidetracked – luckily for her, if she wants to stay.
“But, really, Della, she is impossible. Listen. In the first place she is wild with delight over the house. The very first day she got here she begged me to open every room; and she was not satisfied until every shade in the house was up, so that she might ‘see all the perfectly lovely things,’ which, she declared, were even nicer than Mr. John Pendleton’s – whoever he may be, somebody in Beldingsville, I believe. Anyhow, he isn’t a Ladies’ Aider. I’ve found out that much.
“Then, as if it wasn’t enough to keep me running from room to room (as if I were the guide on a ‘personally conducted’), what did she do but discover a white satin evening gown that I hadn’t worn for years, and beseech me to put it on. And I did put it on – why, I can’t imagine, only that I found myself utterly helpless in her hands.
“But that was only the beginning. She begged then to see everything that I had, and she was so perfectly funny in her stories of the missionary barrels, which she used to ‘dress out of,’ that I had to laugh – though I almost cried, too, to think of the wretched things that poor child had to wear. Of course gowns led to jewels, and she made such a fuss over my two or three rings that I foolishly opened the safe, just to see her eyes pop out. And, Della, I thought that child would go crazy. She put on to me every ring, brooch, bracelet, and necklace that I owned, and insisted on fastening both diamond tiaras in my hair (when she found out what they were), until there I sat, hung with pearls and diamonds and emeralds, and feeling like a heathen goddess in a Hindu temple, especially when that preposterous child began to dance round and round me, clapping her hands and chanting, ‘Oh, how perfectly lovely, how perfectly lovely! How I would love to hang you on a string in the window – you’d make such a beautiful prism!’
“I was just going to ask her what on earth she meant by that when down she dropped in the middle of the floor and began to cry. And what do you suppose she was crying for? Because she was so glad she’d got eyes that could see! Now what do you think of that?
“Of course this isn’t all. It’s only the beginning. Pollyanna has been here four days, and she’s filled every one of them full. She already numbers among her friends the ash-man, the policeman on the beat[20], and the paper boy, to say nothing of every servant in my employ. They seem actually bewitched with her, every one of them. But please do not think I am, for I’m not. I would send the child back to you at once if I didn’t feel obliged to fulfil my promise to keep her this winter. As for her making me forget Jamie and my great sorrow – that is impossible. She only makes me feel my loss all the more keenly – because I have her instead of him. But, as I said, I shall keep her – until she begins to preach. Then back she goes
hastened to make amends – (
even if it isn’t proper – (
the policeman on the beat – (
