United States or Bangladesh ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They came across all kinds of odds and ends—lead pencils, blank-books, an old slate pencil wrapped in gold paper which Billy insisted on using to draw pictures on a slate—he made this squeak so that Maida clapped her hands over her ears.
I had no opportunity to speak alone with Elza, or Georg or Maida that entire evening. Always Tarrano was with us. We sat upon the palace balcony, we men smoking our arrant-cylinders. Tarrano talked and joked like a care-free youth. He was very courteous to Elza, with a holiday spirit upon him. But his eyes never relaxed; and often I could see him measuring her. The aural lights mounted the sky.
“Maida?” the girl repeated questioningly. “Maida?—oh, yes, I know—Maida Flynn. Where did you live before you came here?” “Oh, lots of places.” “But where?” Laura persisted. “Boston, New York, Newport, Pride’s Crossing, the Adirondacks, Europe.” “Oh, my! Have you been to Europe?” Laura’s tone was a little incredulous. “I lived abroad a year.” “Can you speak French?”
“Oh, let me help you!” Maida cried. “I can read as easy as anything.” This was the second thing she regretted saying. For when she came to think of it, she could not see where she was going to have much time to herself. But the little lame boy shook his head. “Can’t,” he said decidedly. “You see, I’m busy at home all day long and you’ll be busy here.
“Hello, Tim,” Billy Potter would say whenever they met. “Fallen into a pud-muddle lately?” The word pud-muddle always sent Tim off into peals of laughter. It was the only thing Maida had discovered that could make him laugh, for he was as serious as Molly was merry. Molly certainly was the jolliest little girl in the court—Maida had never seen her with anything but a smiling face.
It seemed to Maida that the Sunday coming in between was the longest day that she had ever known. When she unlocked the door to the shop, the next morning, she let out a little squeal of joy. “Oh, I would never know it,” she declared. “How much bigger it looks, and lighter and prettier!” Indeed, you would never have known the place yourself. The ceiling had been whitened.
You do not know what it is to live with a perpetual longing for pretty things to starve eight months in order to bring a purple dress and a holiday together. What difference if it rained, hailed, blew, snowed, cycloned? Maida had no umbrella nor overshoes. She had her purple dress and she walked abroad. Let the elements do their worst. A starved heart must have one crumb during a year.
“He’s one of the few reporters who can turn out a good story and tell it straight as I give it to him,” Maida had once heard her father say. Maida knew that Billy could turn out good stories—he had turned out a great many for her. “What has imagination to do with it?” Mr. Westabrook repeated.
She put a hood on her head and a veil over that. She made her wear rubber boots and take an umbrella. Maida got into a gale of laughter during the dressing. “I ought to be wrapped in excelsior now,” she said. “If I fall down in the puddle in the court, Granny,” she threatened merrily, “I never can pick myself up.
I could have slapped her and myself too. "Aunt Kathryn!" exclaimed Maida. Then I could have slapped her as well for interfering. It would serve her right if I married her off to the Prince. The Chauffeulier looked for a second as if he were going to say "Very well, madam; do as you like about that." But Maida's little reproachful exclamation apparently poured balm upon his troubled soul.
Word Of The Day