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Her name is in all the Charity Lists. The destitute orange-girl, the neglected washerwoman, the distressed muffin-man find in her a fast and generous friend. She is always having stalls at Fancy Fairs for the benefit of these hapless beings. Emmy, her children, and the Colonel, coming to London some time back, found themselves suddenly before her at one of these fairs.
Who shall discriminate for me, and keep things true and unconfused at the source?" "Your sister, Mr. Vireo, Luclarion Grapp," Desire repeated, promptly. "And yourself?" "Yes; I and Hazel, all we can. We help them. And now there will be Miss Argenter. As Hazel said, 'We all of us know the Muffin-man. How queer that that ridiculous play should come to mean so much with us!
Just at present he was a muffin-man, and day and night he went through passages and up and down staircases, ringing a noiseless bell and offering phantom muffins to invisible wayfarers.
"Oh, he's just playin' muffin-man, as usual," said Charlotte with petulance. "Fancy wanting to be a muffin-man on a whole holiday!" It was a strange craze, certainly; but Harold, who invented his own games and played them without assistance, always stuck staunchly to a new fad, till he had worn it quite out.
"And what is Mark going to be?" Uncle Henry inquired. "A lighthouse-keeper." "Ah, we all have suchlike ambitions when we are young. I remember that for nearly a year I intended to be a muffin-man," said Uncle Henry severely.
Luclarion Grapp is actually a muffin-woman, you know?" "I'm afraid I don't know the Muffin-man literally, except what I can guess of him by your application," said Mr. Kirkbright, laughing. "I've no doubt I ought to, and that it would do me good." "You will have to come to Greenley Street, and find him out.
Illuminated by chill gas-jets, armed with books and sandwiches, the serried and devoted ranks were composed of typical concert-goers, of types, in some cases, becoming as extinct as the muffin-man; young art-students from the suburbs, dressed in Liberty serges and velveteens, and reading ninepenny editions of Browning and Rossetti though a few, already, were reading Yeats; middle-aged spinsters from Bayswater or South Kensington, who took their weekly concert as they took their daily bath; many earnest young men, soft-hatted and long-haired, studying scores; the usual contingent of the fashionable and economical lady; and the pale-faced business man, bringing an air of duty to the pursuit of pleasure.
"If I may come to Greenley Street, I may learn a good deal beside the Muffin-man," said Mr. Kirkbright, giving her his hand to help her up a steep, slippery place. Desire foolishly blushed. She knew it, and knew that her hat did not defend her in the least. She could not take it back now; she had invited him. But what would he think of her blushing about it? "You can learn what we all learn.
"And look here," I interrupted, wrathfully, "Why does she always give us sums about an apple-woman, or a muffin-man? It just makes a chap hungry. Why doesn't she make one up about a dentist for a change, or somethin' like that?" "Yes," assented Angel, catching at the idea.
We love to fill our thought with speculations on man, even though the man be the muffin-man, rather than with inanimate objects, hills and streams, things to dream about, not to meditate on.
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