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Annie say something vague about never getting a chance because of
Miriam always sticking about at home like a cat at a mouse-hole, that
became, as people say, food for thought. Mrs. Larkins was from the
first flushed, garrulous, and wet and smeared by copious weeping; an
incredibly soaked and crumpled and used-up pocket handkerchief never
left the clutch of her plump red hand. "Goo' girls, all of them," she
kept on saying in a tremulous voice; "such-goo-goo-goo-girls!" She
wetted Mr. Polly dreadfully when she kissed him. Her emotion affected
the buttons down the back of her bodice, and almost the last filial
duty Miriam did before entering on her new life was to close that
gaping orifice for the eleventh time. Her bonnet was small and
ill-balanced, black adorned with red roses, and first it got over her
right eye until Annie told her of it, and then she pushed it over her
left eye and looked ferocious for a space, and after that baptismal
kissing of Mr. Polly the delicate millinery took fright and climbed
right up to the back part of her head and hung on there by a pin, and
flapped piteously at all the larger waves of emotion that filled the
gathering. Mr. Polly became more and more aware of that bonnet as time
went on, until he felt for it like a thing alive. Towards the end it
had yawning fits.
The company did not include Mrs. Johnson, but Johnson came with a
manifest surreptitiousness and backed against walls and watched Mr.
Polly with doubt and speculation in his large grey eyes and whistled
noiselessly and doubtful on the edge of things. He was, so to speak,
to be best man, sotto voce. A sprinkling of girls in gay hats from
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