"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.