United States or Tanzania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
That was his father's cherished dream and would have made the firm Pupkin, Pupkin, Pupkin, and Pupkin, as it ought to have been. But young Peter was kept out of the law by the fool system of examinations devised since his father's time. Hence there was nothing for it but to sling him into a bank; "sling him" was, I think, the expression.
One day the judge would claim that the labour movement was eating out the heart of the country, and the next day he would hold that the hope of the world lay in the organization of the toiling masses. Pupkin shifted his opinions like the glass in a kaleidoscope.
He rode fifteen miles to pass the house twice, and even then it took all the nerve that he had. The people on Oneida Street thought that Mr. Pupkin was crazy, but Zena Pepperleigh knew that he was not. Already, you see, there was a sort of dim parallel between the passing of the bicycle and the last ride of Tancred the Inconsolable along the banks of the Danube.
It was never even known just how much money was stolen from the bank. Some people said ten thousand dollars, others more. The bank, no doubt for business motives, claimed that the contents of the safe were intact and that the robber had been foiled in his design. But none of this matters to the exaltation of Mr. Pupkin. Good fortune, like bad, never comes in small instalments.
His brain was all sizzling and jolly with the bromo-seltzer, and when he fetched out the ice cream bricks and Zena ran to get plates and spoons to eat it with, and Pupkin went with her to help fetch them and they picked out the spoons together, they were so laughing and happy that it was just a marvel. Girls, you know, need no bromo-seltzer. They're full of it all the time.
Pupkin and Zena Pepperleigh constantly met together. They played tennis as partners on the grass court behind Dr.
And if Pupkin had known that all of the afternoon papers in the city reported him dead, he would have felt more luxurious still. That afternoon the Mariposa court sat in enquiry, technically it was summoned in inquest on the dead robber though they hadn't found the body and it was wonderful to see them lining up the witnesses and holding cross-examinations.
Card-playing, after all, is a slow business, unless you put money on it, and, besides, if you are in a bank and are handling money all day, gambling has a fascination. I've seen Pupkin and Mallory Tompkins and Joe Milligan, the dentist, and Mitchell the ticket agent, and the other "boys" sitting round the table with matches enough piled up in front of them to stock a factory.
Mr. Pupkin, I must explain, lived with Mallory Tompkins in rooms over the Exchange Bank, on the very top floor, the third, with Mullins's own rooms below them. Extremely comfortable quarters they were, with two bedrooms and a sitting-room that was all fixed up with snowshoes and tennis rackets on the walls and dance programmes and canoe club badges and all that sort of thing.
On the contrary, Pupkin himself felt that it was absolutely hopeless from the start. There were, it might be admitted, certain things that seemed to indicate progress. In the course of the months of June and July and August, he had taken Zena out in his canoe thirty-one times.
Word Of The Day