She pointed a finger at his chin. “I dare ye, Miles Morse,” she said, her voice fluttering in her throat, for all her audacious words; “I dare ye to discharge me. For all ye're called the Meanest Man in Our Square, ye wouldn't be that mean as to send me away from ye!”
And, with the finger still leveled, she walked' straight to him and was caught and held close to the sober and respectable black coat.
“I'd never dared have asked you, Molly,” said Miles Morse in the voice of one who walks ecstatic amid the wonders of a dream.
“Don't I know that!” she retorted. And then, with a quiver: “Oh, Miles, it's I will make it up to you for that sand-and-spool firecracker!”
Opening her morning mail on the following day, the Bonnie Lassie (for whose schemes and stratagems the stars in their courses fight) gave a little cry and let a bit of paper slip through her fingers. Quickly retrieving it, she turned it over to Cyrus the Gaunt. It was the promised check of Mr. Miles Morse to the Legal Aid Society. Between the words “ten” and “dollars” was a caret, and, above, the added word “hundred” with an indorsement. The signature had also undergone an addendum. It now read: “Miles Morse, per Mrs. M. M. M.”
The Meanest Man in Our Square had abdicated.
PAULA OF THE HOUSETOP
WHAT first struck you about the house was that it frowned. Not angrily, but with a kind of dull scorn. Perhaps this was its way of emphasizing its superior aloofness from the other houses in Our Square which had gone down in the social scale while it maintained its aristocracy untainted. It was squat and broad and drab, like the first Varick who had built it, and the succeeding Varicks who had inherited and dwelt in it even to the sixth and seventh generations. Being numbered 13, it would naturally have a sinister repute; and this was not improved by the two suicides which had marked its occupancy; suicides not of despair or remorse or fury, but of cold, grim disgust. Then there was the episode of old Vernam Varick, who dabbled in diabolical mixtures in his secret room on the third floor front under the tutelage of no less an instructor than the Devil, and, having quarreled with Old Nick over a moot point in alchemy, chased him out of the window and followed, himself, to the accompaniment of a loud and sulphurous detonation. What became of His Satanic Majesty has never been properly determined, but old Ver-nam arrived upon the pavement in due time, crumpled up, and thereafter circulated in a wheeled chair, sniffing about after real-estate investments to pass the time. He it was whose purchases of uptown property (when anything above Forty-second Street was “uptown”) severely reprehended by the rest of the clan, subsequently reestablished the Varick fortunes, piling up riches beyond the imagination of Our Square. Except that he had more imagination, he was a pattern of all the Varicks, each broad and squat of architecture like the house they dwelt in; each, if possible, more crabbed and pigheaded and stupidly haughty than his predecessor. In time, his son, heritor of the qualities of the breed, grew up and married. And then the dull generations burst into flower in Paula Varick. So the Varicks put her in a cage.