An old-fashioned girl
MINERVA
Polly, number one, combines a love of cookery with a love of bookery, to phrase the matter as a certain poet would have phrased it, and to these loves she adds a third, the love of needlework. If you should tell her that a good needlewoman makes a bad student, she will tell you in reply that Minerva beat Arachne in the art of needlework. She is so far from being a bad student that it is only part of her knowledge to know that.
Polly, number two, is not learned at all, but is of marvellous dexterity with her fingers. She should have lived in the days of spears and spindles, some people say. These people are of those who have nothing in their heads but a tongue.
Of the Marys called Mary, there passes first that Mary to whom, albeit her home is London, a Monday Popular Concert is not “a Pop,” and to whom a photograph is not a photo.
Next passes the Mary to whom an Ellen said—
“You must have been born grown-up, like a fly, Mary.”
To whom Mary: “What do you mean?”
“Why, don’t you know, goose, that flies don’t grow, that they—let me think of the way it’s put in the books—emerge from the larva in a perfect state?”
To which Mary, dreamily: “Do they? That’s very interesting.”