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look out."
The girl and Mr. Polly did not meet on every one of those ten days;
one was Sunday and she could not come, and on the eighth the school
reassembled and she made vague excuses. All their meetings amounted to
this, that she sat on the wall, more or less in bounds as she
expressed it, and let Mr. Polly fall in love with her and try to
express it below. She sat in a state of irresponsible exaltation,
watching him and at intervals prodding a vivisecting point of
encouragement into him--with that strange passive cruelty which is
natural to her sex and age.
And Mr. Polly fell in love, as though the world had given way beneath
him and he had dropped through into another, into a world of luminous
clouds and of desolate hopeless wildernesses of desiring and of wild
valleys of unreasonable ecstasies, a world whose infinite miseries
were finer and in some inexplicable way sweeter than the purest gold
of the daily life, whose joys--they were indeed but the merest remote
glimpses of joy--were brighter than a dying martyr's vision of heaven.
Her smiling face looked down upon him out of heaven, her careless pose
was the living body of life. It was senseless, it was utterly foolish,
but all that was best and richest in Mr. Polly's nature broke like a
wave and foamed up at that girl's feet, and died, and never touched
her. And she sat on the wall and marvelled at him and was amused, and
once, suddenly moved and wrung by his pleading, she bent down rather
shamefacedly and gave him a freckled, tennis-blistered little paw to
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