Polly's Business Venture

by Lillian Elizabeth Roy

Sleet and drizzle began falling, and Tom was soon soaked through, but he was heedless of clinging clothes and wet shoes.

After an hour of self-pity, he got up and started down the drive. By this time he was almost frozen, but he congratulated himself on the fact that he might have pneumonia and die. Then Polly might feel sorry for her coldness!

Following the suggestion this idea presented, Tom wilfully waded through the slush in the gutters, and thoroughly drenched his patent-leather shoes in crossing the streets, until his feet were not only wet but freezing inside the shoes.

He found a cheap restaurant where the show-windows displayed baskets of artificial fruit; and as a center-piece of this decoration, there was a great block of ice holding up a dressed goose, with red holly twined about it.

Tom detested quick-lunch places where the steam satisfied a man’s hunger, the moment he came in contact with its heavy odors, but he reveled in this evening’s opportunity to be a martyr, so he sat down and ordered corn-beef and cabbage because he loathed it.

Although he could not eat much of the delectable dish he had ordered, he was determined to finish his day accordingly. So he ordered Neapolitan ice-cream and coffee. The ice-cream was served with the tissue paper still wrapped about the cake—to prove that no hands had been in contact with the dessert before serving it. But the highly colored stripes of the soapy cream that refused to melt, even when he dropped a spoonful into his oily coffee, cured him of further martyrdom to the cause of love.

He hastily got up from the table, paid his ticket and ran out. By this time, he felt so sick and chilled that he gloated in the assurance that soon he would be in a raging fever. He pictured Polly’s regrets when she should return home at midnight and hear that he had been taken to a hospital, with a fatal case of double pneumonia. He had decided on having it double, after he left the restaurant, as that would kill him sooner. In this state of mind he had to dodge a taxi and slipped to fall into a mud puddle.

But Tom could not resist the desire to see his mother once more, before he died; and after fighting off this inclination for another hour or two, he was feeling so perfectly awful, that he knew his last call had come for him.

He had been sneezing every few minutes for the past hour, and his eyes were running like twin rivers. His nose was so stuffy that he could hardly enunciate the words, when he told a cabby to “Ta-ge me to sig siggy-sig West End Avenoo.”

During the short time he was in the cab, he could not breathe, and he had to keep his mouth open to be able to inhale any air at all. He paid off the taxi, and went to his mother’s apartment. Before he could change his mind about calling, he had pushed the bell-button.