Happy Pollyooly | Page 6

splendid brick," he said
enthusiastically.
Hilary Vance was one of those great-hearted men of thirty who crave
for sympathy; he must unbosom himself. Pollyooly was not quite the
confidante of his ideal; but his mentor, James, the novelist (not Henry),
was in Scotland; and the salt sea flowed between him and the
Honourable John Ruffin. Pollyooly was at hand, and she was intelligent.
No later than the next morning he began to talk to her of Flossie--her
beauty, her charm, her sympathetic nature, her womanliness, and her
intelligence.

Pollyooly received his confidences with the utmost politeness. She
could not, indeed, follow him in his higher, finer flights; but she
succeeded in keeping on her angel face an expression of sufficient
appreciation to satisfy his unexacting mind. It is to be feared that she
did not really appreciate the splendour of the passion he displayed
before her; it is even to be feared that she regarded it as no more than a
further eccentricity in an eccentric nature. She grew curious, however,
to see the lady who had so enthralled him, and was, therefore, pleased
when she suggested that she should relieve Mrs. Thomas of the
housekeeping, that he accepted the suggestion and told her to procure,
among other things, some flowers for the studio.
She found Flossie to be a fair, fluffy-haired, plump and pretty girl of
twenty, entirely pleased with herself and the world. It seemed to
Pollyooly that she gave herself airs. She came away with the flowers,
finding the ecstasies of Mr. Hilary Vance as inexplicable as ever. But
she did not puzzle over the matter at all, for it was none of her business;
Mr. Vance was like that.
Having once begun, Hilary Vance fell into the way of confiding to her
from day to day his hopes and fears, the varying fortunes of his suit.
Some days the skies of his heaven were fair and serene; some days they
were livid with the darkest kind of cloud. Pollyooly, by dint of hearing
so much about it, began to get some understanding of the matter, and
consequently to take a greater interest in it. Always she made an
excellent listener. Her intercourse with the Honourable John Ruffin had
taught her that a comprehension of the matter under discussion was by
no means a necessary qualification of the excellent listener; and Hilary
Vance grew entirely satisfied with his confidante.
The affair was pursuing the usual course of his affairs of the heart: one
day he was well up in the seventh heaven, talking joyfully of an early
proposal and an immediate marriage; another he was well down in the
seventh hell. Pollyooly was always ready with the kind of sympathy,
chiefly facial, the changing occasion demanded.
Then one day her host had gone out to lunch with an editor and she was
taking hers with the Lump, when there came a rather hurried knocking

at the front door. She opened it, and to her surprise found Flossie
standing without. She was at once stricken with admiration of Flossie's
hat, which was very large and apparently loaded with the contents of
several beds of flowers. But Flossie herself looked to be in a state of
considerable perturbation.
"Is Mr. Vance in?" she said somewhat breathlessly.
She seemed to have been hurrying, and the hat was a little on one side.
Pollyooly eyed her with some disfavour, and said coldly: "No, he isn't."
"Will he be in soon?" said Flossie anxiously.
"I don't know," said Pollyooly yet more coldly.
Flossie gazed up and down the street with a helpless air; then she said:
"Then I'd better come In and write a note for him and leave it." And she
walked down the passage and into the studio.
Still wearing an air of disapproval, Pollyooly found paper and pencil
for her; and she sat down and began to write. She wrote a few words,
stopped, and bit the end of the pencil.
"It's dreadful when gentlemen will quarrel about you," she said in a
tone and with an air in which gratified vanity forced itself firmly
through the affectation of distress.
"What gentlemen?" said Pollyooly.
"Mr. Vance and my fiongsay, Mr. Reginald Butterwick," said Flossie.
"I don't know how he found out that Mr. Vance is friendly with me; and
I'm sure there's nothing in it--I told him so. But he's that jealous when
there's a gentleman in the case that he can't believe a word I say. It isn't
that he doesn't try; but he can't. He says he can't. He's got a passionate
nature; he says he has. And he can't do anything with it. It runs away
with him; he says it does. And now it's Mr. Vance. How he found out I
can't think--unless it was something I