and fed like a princess at the present moment? Have I not two hundred and fifty dollars in the bank, and am I not earning twenty-five dollars a month with absolute regularity? Avaunt, cold Fear!”
“How was it that the house was not insured?” asked Mr. Bird.
“I ‘m sure I don’t know. It was insured once upon a time, if I remember right; when it got uninsured, I can’t tell. How do things get uninsured, Mr. Bird?”
“The insurance lapses, of course, if the premium is n’t regularly paid.”
“Oh, that would account for it!” said Polly easily. “There were quantities of things that were n’t paid regularly, though they were always paid in course of time. You ought to have asked me if we were insured, Edgar,—you were the boy of the house,—insurance is n’t a girl’s department. Let me see the telegrams, please.”
They all laughed heartily over Mrs. Greenwood’s characteristic message.
“Think of ‘husband’ bearing that aged ice-cream freezer and that leaky boiler to a place of safety!” exclaimed Polly. “‘All that was left of them, left of six hundred!’ Well, my family portraits, piano, freezer, and boiler will furnish a humble cot very nicely in my future spinster days. By the way, the land did n’t burn up, I suppose, and that must be good for something, is n’t it?”
“Rather,” answered Edgar; “a corner lot on the best street in town, four blocks from the new hotel site! It’s worth eighteen hundred or two thousand dollars, at least.”
“Then why do you worry about me, good people? I ‘m not a heroine. If I were sitting on the curbstone without a roof to my head, and did n’t know where I should get my dinner, I should cry! But I smell my dinner” (here she sniffed pleasurably), “and I think it ‘s chicken! You see, it’s so difficult for me to realize that I ‘m a pauper, living here, a pampered darling in the halls of wealth, with such a large income rolling up daily that I shall be a prey to fortune-hunters by the time I am twenty! Pshaw! don’t worry about me! This is just the sort of diet I have been accustomed to from my infancy! I rather enjoy it!”
Whereupon Edgar recited an impromptu nonsense verse:—
“There ‘s a queer little maiden named Polly,
Who always knows when to be jolly.
When ruined by fire
Her spirits rise higher.
This most inconsistent Miss Polly.”
Chapter XVI.
The Candle Called Patience
The burning of the house completely prostrated Mrs. Clementine Churchill Chadwick Greenwood, who, it is true, had the actual shock of the conflagration to upset her nervous system, though she suffered no financial loss.
Mr. Greenwood was heard to remark that he wished he could have foreseen that the house would burn down, for now he should have to move anyway, and if he had known that a few months before, why—
Here the sentence always ended mysteriously, and the neighbors finished it as they liked.
The calamity affected Polly, on the other hand, very much like a tonic. She felt the necessity of “bracing” to meet the fresh responsibilities that seemed waiting for her in the near future; and night and day, in sleeping and waking, resting and working, a plan was formulating itself in the brain just roused from its six months’ apathy,—a novel, astonishing, enchanting, revolutionary plan, which she bided her time to disclose.
The opportunity came one evening after dinner, when Mrs. Bird, and her brother, Edgar and herself, were gathered in the library.
The library was a good place in which to disclose plans, or ask advice, or whisper confidences. The great carved oak mantel held on the broad space above the blazing logs the graven motto, “Esse Quod Opto.” The walls were lined with books from floor half-way to ceiling, and from the tops of the cases Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and the Sage of Concord looked down with benignant wisdom. The table in the centre was covered with a methodical litter of pamphlets and magazines, and a soft light came from the fire and from two tall, shaded lamps.
Mr. Bird, as was his wont, leaned back in his leather chair, puffing delicate rings of smoke into the air. Edgar sat by the centre table, idly playing with a paper-knife. Mrs. Bird sat in her low rocking-chair with a bit of fancy-work, and Polly, on the hearth rug, leaned cosily back against her Fairy Godmother’s knees.
The clinging tendrils in Polly’s nature, left hanging so helplessly when her mother was torn away, reached out more and more to wind themselves about lovely Mrs. Bird, who, notwithstanding her three manly sons, had a place in her heart left sadly vacant by the loss of her only daughter.
Polly broke one of the pleasant silences. An open fire makes such delightful silences, if you ever noticed. When you sit in a room without it, the gaps in the conversation make everybody seem dull; the last comer rises with embarrassment and thinks he must be going, and you wish that some one would say the next thing and keep the ball rolling. The open fire arranges all these little matters with a perfect tact and grace all its own. It is acknowledged to be the centre of attraction, and the people gathered about it are only supernumeraries. It blazes and crackles and snaps cheerily, the logs break and fall, the coals glow and fade and glow again, and the dull man can always poke the fire if his wit desert him. Who ever feels like telling a precious secret over a steam-heater?
Polly looked away from everybody and gazed straight into the blaze.
“I have been thinking over a plan for my future work,” she said, “and I want to tell it to you and see if you all approve and think me equal to it. It used to come to me in flashes, after this Fairy Godmother of mine opened an avenue for my surplus energy by sending me out as a story-teller; but lately I have n’t had any heart for it. Work grew monotonous and disagreeable and hopeless, and I ‘m afraid I had no wish to be useful or helpful to myself or to anybody else. But now everything is different. I am not so rich as I was (I wish, Mr. Bird, you would not smile so provokingly when I mention my riches!), and I must not be idle any longer; so this is my plan, I want to be a story-teller by profession. Perhaps you will say that nobody has ever done it; but surely that is an advantage; I should have the field to myself for a while, at least. I have dear Mrs. Bird’s little poor children as a foundation. Now, I would like to get groups of other children together in somebody’s parlor twice a week and tell them stories,—the older children one day in the week and the younger ones another. Of course I have n’t thought out all the details, because I hoped my Fairy Godmother would help me there, if she approved of my plan; but I have ever so many afternoons all arranged, and enough stories and songs at my tongue’s end for three months. Do you think it impossible or nonsensical, Mr. Bird?”
“No,” said he thoughtfully, after a moment’s pause. “It seems on the first hearing to be perfectly feasible. In fact, in one sense it will not be an experiment at all. You have tried your powers, gained self-possession and command of your natural resources; developed your ingenuity, learned the technicalities of your art, so to speak, already. You propose now, as I understand, to extend your usefulness, widen your sphere of action, address yourself to a larger public, and make a profession out of what was before only a side issue in your life. It’s a new field, and it ‘s a noble one, taken in its highest aspect, as you have always taken
