Mr. Rusper ceased altogether to come over to the outfitter's, and Mr.

Polly called upon the ironmonger only with the completest air of

casuality. And everything they said to each other led now to flat

contradiction and raised voices. Rusper had been warned in vague and

alarming terms that Mr. Polly insulted and made game of him; he

couldn't discover exactly where; and so it appeared to him now that

every word of Mr. Polly's might be an insult meriting his resentment,

meriting it none the less because it was masked and cloaked.

Soon Mr. Polly's calls upon Mr. Rusper ceased also, and then Mr.

Rusper, pursuing incomprehensible lines of thought, became afflicted

with a specialised shortsightedness that applied only to Mr. Polly. He

would look in other directions when Mr. Polly appeared, and his large

oval face assumed an expression of conscious serenity and deliberate

happy unawareness that would have maddened a far less irritable person

than Mr. Polly. It evoked a strong desire to mock and ape, and

produced in his throat a cough of singular scornfulness, more

particularly when Mr. Rusper also assisted, with an assumed

unconsciousness that was all his own.

Then one day Mr. Polly had a bicycle accident.

His bicycle was now very old, and it is one of the concomitants of a

bicycle's senility that its free wheel should one day obstinately

cease to be free. It corresponds to that epoch in human decay when an

209

The History of Mr Polly