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Here, too, was the general post office, where you might see letters marvellously folded, directed wrong side upward, stamped with a thimble, and superscribed to some of the Dollys, or Pollys, or Peters, or Moseses aforenamed or not named.
He therefore submitted, with a very good grace, to seeing a good deal of the young man, and if it occasionally irked him to have Stephen Kenwick's grandson about, he found his account in the spirit and ease with which his two Pollys dealt with the situation. Kenwick, of course, attached himself ostensibly to the Daymond party.
Would you believe, when I met him in the street and spoke to him, he pretended he'd never heard such a name as Clover!" "You met him, did you? When?" "Oh I'll tell you all about that afterwards. It's getting late. We shall have lots of talk. You'll let me take you home? We'll have a cab, shall we? Lady Pollys don't walk about the streets on a wet night." She stood in thought.
"Colonel Steele," she asked, "should you greatly mind if one of your Pollys should find it in her heart to make my boy happy?" "What's that?" the Colonel cried. "You don't mean? Bless my soul, I never thought of such a thing!" "It seems the most natural thing in the world to me," she said. "And yet, supposing your Polly should fail us!
She has married off three of them already." "Three sisters?" "No; two sisters and a father. There's nobody left now, but these two." It was all very like that trip on the lagoons yesterday; only, in the one case, he had seen the lagoons through the eyes of his Pollys, while to-day he seemed to be seeing his Pollys through the eyes of the woman he loved.
That a woman should take a second husband had long seemed to him both natural and proper, but the reasons were obvious, to his mind at least, why a man should be more constant. Be that as it may, however, here they were, Uncle Dan and his Pollys, and to-day, of all days, the Colonel was little disposed to cavil at anything. "What good manners this man has!"
As he sat there touching upon one characteristic and another of his Pollys, in the direct, soldierly fashion that cuts through ordinary modes of speech, clean and incisive as a sword-point, he vaguely felt that this was only a postponement, a respite. It could not last, this extraordinary, unaccountable resignation. He was not sure that he should approve of it if it did.
Yet such reminiscences were not wholly foreign to his thoughts, and they doubtless lent their own agreeable though unrecognised flavour to his meditations, as he looked upon the Venetian lagoons through the eyes of his Pollys. In the course of time two other little maids had come upon the scene, Susan and Isabella were their unsuggestive names.
The tension of his first hours in Venice was apt to yield, though not usually as early as this. But then, he had never before had the pleasure of his two precious Pollys in anticipation. As the gondola drew near a certain stone bridge guarded by an iron railing, the sight of a woman in a sulphur shawl, lingering there to speak with a neighbour, gave him a reminiscent sense of amused gratification.
The evening again was a glorious one, and again the roses were left behind. When the Colonel and his Pollys appeared at the steps of the Venezia, Vittorio greeted them with a radiant "bellissimo!" The moon was all but full and not a breath of air stirred the wide reaches of the lagoon, visible beyond San Giorgio.
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