Pollyanna did not see the frown. Pollyanna's eyes were on the hurrying throngs about them.
"My! what a lot of people," she was saying happily. "There's even more of them than there was the other time I was here; but I haven't seen anybody, yet, that I saw then, though I've looked for them everywhere. Of course the lady and the little baby lived in Honolulu, so probably THEY WOULDN'T be here; but there was a little girl, Susie Smith—she lived right here in Boston. Maybe you know her though. Do you know Susie Smith?"
"No, I don't know Susie Smith," replied Mrs. Carew, dryly.
"Don't you? She's awfully nice, and SHE'S pretty—black curls, you know; the kind I'm going to have when I go to Heaven. But never mind; maybe I can find her for you so you WILL know her. Oh, my! what a perfectly lovely automobile! And are we going to ride in it?" broke off Pollyanna, as they came to a pause before a handsome limousine, the door of which a liveried chauffeur was holding open.
[Illustration: "'Oh, my! What a perfectly lovely automobile!'">[
The chauffeur tried to hide a smile—and failed. Mrs. Carew, however, answered with the weariness of one to whom "rides" are never anything but a means of locomotion from one tiresome place to another probably quite as tiresome.
"Yes, we're going to ride in it." Then "Home, Perkins," she added to the deferential chauffeur.
"Oh, my, is it yours?" asked Pollyanna, detecting the unmistakable air of ownership in her hostess's manner. "How perfectly lovely! Then you must be rich—awfully—I mean EXCEEDINGLY rich, more than the kind that just has carpets in every room and ice cream Sundays, like the Whites—one of my Ladies' Aiders, you know. (That is, SHE was a Ladies' Aider.) I used to think THEY were rich, but I know now that being really rich means you've got diamond rings and hired girls and sealskin coats, and dresses made of silk and velvet for every day, and an automobile. Have you got all those?"
"Why, y-yes, I suppose I have," admitted Mrs. Carew, with a faint smile.
"Then you are rich, of course," nodded Pollyanna, wisely. "My Aunt Polly has them, too, only her automobile is a horse. My! but don't I just love to ride in these things," exulted Pollyanna, with a happy little bounce. "You see I never did before, except the one that ran over me. They put me IN that one after they'd got me out from under it; but of course I didn't know about it, so I couldn't enjoy it. Since then I haven't been in one at all. Aunt Polly doesn't like them. Uncle Tom does, though, and he wants one. He says he's got to have one, in his business. He's a doctor, you know, and all the other doctors in town have got them now. I don't know how it will come out. Aunt Polly is all stirred up over it. You see, she wants Uncle Tom to have what he wants, only she wants him to want what she wants him to want. See?"