"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:
"I think it will be well for you to cease to be my housekeeper at Pyechurch, Mrs. Bride. People will ask you about our relations of course, because by the sea there is so much time for idle curiosity; and you had better tell them that you are a cousin of mine. That is nothing but the truth, for you are undoubtedly a red Deeping; and all the Deepings, red or neutral-tinted, are cousins, first, second, third, fourth, and so on, of mine."
"Yes, sir," said Pollyooly gravely.
"Also I think that you had better give yourself a few airs. You will have a better time that way, for airs procure you a welcome in the best circles. Be a red Deeping—not too truculent, you know, but firm."