There is Mrs. Hudson’s bell! She has rung twice. Rose won’t answer it. I must fly!
Saturday, November 29.
Blue! blue! blue! oh dear, I do feel blue, and so does every one else, even the kitten! In the first place the house is cold. We have not been able to get the dining-room above 58° at any time to-day, and the boarders appear to believe that we keep it at that cosey temperature out of pure spite and malevolence.
“My friend Mrs. Bo-gardus considers it a stupid form of suicide to economise coal in such weather,” Mrs. Hudson remarked this morning. We had not been economising, but nevertheless we felt crushed; for whenever Mrs. Hudson has a criticism to make it comes under cover of the same potent Name,—perhaps I don’t spell it quite correctly, but so it is invariably pronounced. None of us have ever met Mrs. Bo-gardus, none of us ever expect to meet her,—she is a sort of cousin to the famous “Mrs. Harris,” we are sometimes tempted to believe,—but it is through her reported remarks that we are given the coveted, if immensely overestimated, advantage of “seeing ourselves as others see us.”
This morning’s none too flattering vision resulted in Haze being sent down to shake up the furnace;—which did not prevent Miss Brown from wearing her pink knitted shawl all day, and sniffing, and rubbing the red tip of her nose. Just why these artless actions should have enraged me I don’t know; but, somehow, they did.
As Ernie once sagely remarked,—“However innocent a boarder’s habits, they are bound to be unpleasing.”
Then, too, I broke a string of my mandolin, and I have not five cents in the world with which to buy another. It is almost amusing to be as poor as that. Also, Haze is growing cross as well as homely, because it does not agree with him to study late at night.
Last evening when I put on my golf-cape and ran up to the workshop for a little chat I found the poor boy sitting in the flying-machine with his overcoat on,—it is cold in the workshop, let me tell you,—pegging away at his Latin. He looked up over his glasses and scowled at me.
“Won’t it make you dream worse than ever to sit there, dear?” I asked.
“The sails keep the draughts off,” answered Hazard in sepulchral tones.