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Page 47
"It is your only property," said Mr. Bird, trying to present the other
side of the case properly, "and it was not insured."
"What of that?" she asked briskly. "Am I not housed 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.
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