Pip-Emma put her arm over Janet's shoulder. It was an accolade, and
Janet knew it.
"Gee—you poor kid!" Pip-Emma said, and relapsed into deep thought again.
The two wandered off the landing stage together. Outside the gameroom Claudine was writing up a notice on the blackboard. The twins went to a progressive school where you learned spelling only if you felt the urge. The twins had never felt it.
"You don't spell Saturday with an 'a' in the middle," Pip-Emma said.
A hot and flustered twin rubbed out the word with a lofty air of apprehended carelessness, and Pip-Emma wrote it in for her.
"If I spelled like you do," she said, "old Perks would give me hell."
* * * * *
The harassed Penguins pinned one of their last hopes on horses. It seemed probable that if Pip-Emma had never seen any trees, she had never seen horses, either—or only from a distance—and that she would be impressed. But it turned out that Pip-Emma's uncle had a horse—not the W.P.A. uncle but the mounted-cop uncle—and that it was a bigger and better horse than anything in the Camp stables. Pip-Emma had actually ridden it from Ninth to Tenth Avenue. Moreover her uncle had chased Squint-Eyed Peters down Forty-fifth Street and shot him and his armored car so full of holes that it was hardly worth while cleaning them up. Pip-Emma told the story after taps and in such gory detail that the Penguins didn't know or care that discipline was going to the dogs.
They learned at the same time that Mr. Binns, in his unregenerate youth, had been an Englishman and had fought in the Great War and that Emma's name was Pip because in English soldier language Pip-Emma meant anything that happened after midday. And Emma had happened in Hell's Kitchen at 3:30.
The Penguins sat up in their beds and listened spellbound. The glamour surrounding Wall Street, Big Business, and the kind but stoutish and baldish gentlemen who were their fathers was suffering an acute depression. The prospect of their fathers' appearance on Saturday and of Pip-Emma's dispassionate appraisal filled the Penguins with uneasiness.