“What a shame! She didn’t hear, did she?” Pollyanna was saying, her eyes, also, wistfully following the nurse. “And I didn’t WANT her to go now a bit. But then, I’ve got you, haven’t I? I can be glad for that.”
“Oh, yes, you’ve got me – and I’ve got you,” returned the lady, not very graciously. “Come, we go this way,” she directed, with a motion toward the right.
Obediently Pollyanna turned and trotted at Mrs. Carew’s side, through the huge station; but she looked up once or twice rather anxiously into the lady’s unsmiling face. At last she spoke hesitatingly.
“I expect maybe you thought – I’d be pretty,” she hazarded, in a troubled voice.
“P-pretty?” repeated Mrs. Carew.
“Yes – with curls, you know, and all that. And of course you did wonder how I DID look, just as I did you. Only I KNEW you’d be pretty and nice, on account of your sister. I had her to go by, and you didn’t have anybody. And of course I’m not pretty, on account of the freckles, and it ISN’t nice when you’ve been expecting a PRETTY little girl, to have one come like me; and —”
“Nonsense, child!” interrupted Mrs. Carew, a trifle sharply. “Come, we’ll see to your trunk now, then we’ll go home. I had hoped that my sister would come with us; but it seems she didn’t see fit – even for this one night.”
Pollyanna smiled and nodded.
“I know; but she couldn’t, probably. Somebody wanted her, I expect. Somebody was always wanting her at the Sanatorium. It’s a bother, of course, when folks do want you all the time, isn’t it? – ’cause you can’t have yourself when you want yourself, lots of times. Still, you can be kind of glad for that, for it IS nice to be wanted, isn’t it?”
There was no reply – perhaps because for the first time in her life Mrs. Carew was wondering if anywhere in the world there was any one who really wanted her – not that she WISHED to be wanted, of course, she told herself angrily, pulling herself up with a jerk, and frowning down at the child by her side.
Pollyanna did not see the frown. Pollyanna’s eyes were on the hurrying throngs about them.
“My! what a lot of people,” she was saying happily. “There’s even more of them than there was the other time I was here; but I haven’t seen anybody, yet, that I saw then, though I’ve looked for them everywhere. Of course the lady and the little baby lived in Honolulu, so probably THEY WOULDN’t be here; but there was a little girl, Susie Smith – she lived right here in Boston. Maybe you know her though. Do you know Susie Smith?”
“No, I don’t know Susie Smith,” replied Mrs. Carew, dryly.
“Don’t you? She’s awfully nice, and SHE’s pretty – black curls, you know; the kind I’m going to have when I go to Heaven. But never mind; maybe I can find her for you so you WILL know her. Oh, my! what a perfectly lovely automobile! And are we going to ride in it?” broke off Pollyanna, as they came to a pause before a handsome limousine, the door of which a liveried chauffeur was holding open.
The chauffeur tried to hide a smile – and failed. Mrs. Carew, however, answered with the weariness of one to whom “rides” are never anything but a means of locomotion from one tiresome place to another probably quite as tiresome.
“Yes, we’re going to ride in it.” Then “Home, Perkins,” she added to the deferential chauffeur.
“Oh, my, is it yours?” asked Pollyanna, detecting the unmistakable air of ownership in her hostess’s manner. “How perfectly lovely! Then you must be rich – awfully – I mean EXCEEDINGLY rich, more than the kind that just has carpets in every room and ice cream Sundays, like the Whites – one of my Ladies’ Aiders, you know. (That is, SHE was a Ladies’ Aider.) I used to think THEY were rich, but I know now that being really rich means you’ve got diamond rings and hired girls and sealskin coats, and dresses made of silk and velvet for every day, and an automobile. Have you got all those?”
“Why, y-yes, I suppose I have,” admitted Mrs. Carew, with a faint smile.
“Then you are rich, of course,” nodded Pollyanna, wisely. “My Aunt Polly has them, too, only her automobile is a horse. My! but don’t I just love to ride in these things,” exulted Pollyanna, with a happy little bounce. “You see I never did before, except the one that ran over me. They put me IN that one after they’d got me out from under it; but of course I didn’t know about it, so I couldn’t enjoy it. Since then I haven’t been in one at all. Aunt Polly doesn’t like them. Uncle Tom does, though, and he wants one. He says he’s got to have one, in his business. He’s a doctor, you know, and all the other doctors in town have got them now. I don’t know how it will come out. Aunt Polly is all stirred up over it. You see, she wants Uncle Tom to have what he wants, only she wants him to want what she wants him to want. See?”
Mrs. Carew laughed suddenly.
“Yes, my dear, I think I see,” she answered demurely, though her eyes still carried – for them – a most unusual twinkle.
“All right,” sighed Pollyanna contentedly. “I thought you would; still, it did sound sort of mixed when I said it. Oh, Aunt Polly says she wouldn’t mind having an automobile, so much, if she could have the only one there was in the world, so there wouldn’t be any one else to run into her; but – My! what a lot of houses!” broke off Pollyanna, looking about her with round eyes of wonder. “Don’t they ever stop? Still, there’d have to be a lot of them for all those folks to live in, of course, that I saw at the station, besides all these here on the streets. And of course where there ARE more folks, there are more to know. I love folks. Don’t you?”
“LOVE FOLKS!”
“Yes, just folks, I mean. Anybody – everybody.”
“Well, no, Pollyanna, I can’t say that I do,” replied Mrs. Carew, coldly, her brows contracted.
Mrs. Carew’s eyes had lost their twinkle. They were turned rather mistrustfully, indeed, on Pollyanna. To herself Mrs. Carew was saying: “Now for preachment number one, I suppose, on my duty to mix with my fellow-men, à la Sister Della!”
“Don’t you? Oh, I do,” sighed Pollyanna. “They’re all so nice and so different, you know. And down here there must be such a lot of them to be nice and different. Oh, you don’t know how glad I am so soon that I came! I knew I would be, anyway, just as soon as I found out you were YOU – that is, Miss Wetherby’s sister, I mean. I love Miss Wetherby, so I knew I should you, too; for of course you’d be alike – sisters, so – even if you weren’t twins like Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Peck – and they weren’t quite alike, anyway, on account of the wart. But I reckon you don’t know what I mean, so I’ll tell you.”
And thus it happened that Mrs. Carew, who had been steeling herself for a preachment on social ethics, found herself, much to her surprise and a little to her discomfiture, listening to the story of a wart on the nose of one Mrs. Peck, Ladies’ Aider.
By the time the story was finished the limousine had turned into Commonwealth Avenue, and Pollyanna immediately began to exclaim at the beauty of a street which had such a “lovely big long yard all the way up and down through the middle of it,” and which was all the nicer, she said, “after all those little narrow streets.”
“Only I should think every one would want to live on it,” she commented enthusiastically.
“Very likely; but that would hardly be possible,” retorted Mrs. Carew, with uplifted eyebrows.
Pollyanna, mistaking the expression on her face for one of dissatisfaction that her own home was not on the beautiful Avenue, hastened to make amends[18].
“Why, no, of course not,” she agreed. “And I didn’t mean that the narrower streets weren’t just as nice,” she hurried on; “and even better, maybe, because you could be glad you didn’t have to go so far when you wanted to run across the way to borrow eggs or soda, and – Oh, but DO you live here?” she interrupted herself, as the car came to a stop before the imposing Carew doorway. “Do you live here, Mrs. Carew?”