Annie earned for both. In the process, happiness came back to her face.
To the fat Rosser twin accrues the credit of a pleasurable discovery about Plooie. This was that, if you sneaked softly up behind him and shouted: “Hey, Plooie! What was you doing in the war?” his jaw would drop and his whole rackety body begin to quiver, and he would heave his burden to his shoulder and break into a spavined gallop, muttering and sobbing like one demented. As the juvenile sense of humor is highly developed in Our Square, Plooie got a good deal of exercise, first and last.
Eventually he foiled them by coming out only in school hours. This didn’t help his trade. But then his trade had dwindled to the vanishing point anyway. Even Madame Tallafferr had dropped him. She preferred not to deal with a poltroon, as she put it.
On the day of the great exodus, Plooie put in some extra hours. He was in no danger from his youthful persecutors, because they had all gone up to line Fifth Avenue and help cheer the visiting King of the Belgians. So had such of the rest of Our Square as were not at work. The place was practically deserted. Nevertheless, Plooie prowled about, uttering his cracked and lugubrious cry in the forlorn hope of picking up a parapluie to raccommode. I was one of the few left to hear him, because Mendel, the jeweler, had most inconsiderately gone to view royalty, leaving my unrepaired glasses locked in his shop; otherwise I, too, would have been on the Fifth Avenue curb shouting with the best of them. Do not misinterpret me. For the divinity that doth hedge a king I care as little as one should whose forbears fought in the Revolution. But for the divinity of high courage and devotion that certifies to the image of God within man, I should have been proud to take off my old but still glossy silk hat to Albert of the Belgians. So I was rather cross, and it was well for my equanimity that the Bonnie Lassie, who had remained at home for reasons which are peculiarly her own affair and that of Cyrus the Gaunt, should have come over to my favorite bench to cheer me up. Said the Bonnie Lassie:
“I wonder why Plooie didn’t go to see his king.”
“Sense of shame,” I suggested acidly.
“Yes?” said the Bonnie Lassie in a tone which I mistrusted.
“It is no use,” I assured her, “for you to favor me with that pitying and contemptuous smile of yours, for I can’t see it. Mendel has my nearer range of vision locked in his shop.”
“I was just thinking,” said the Bonnie Lassie in ruminant accents, “how nice it must be to look back on a long life of unspotted correctness with not an item in it to be ashamed of. It gives one such a comfortable basis for sitting in judgment.”
“Her lips drip honey,” I observed, “and the poison of asps is under her tongue.”