CHAPTER THE FIFTH
MR. POLLY TAKES A VACATION
I
MR. POLLY returned to Clapham from the funeral celebration prepared for trouble, and took his dismissal in a manly spirit.
“You’ve merely anti-separated me by a hair,” he said politely.
And he told them in the dormitory that he meant to take a little holiday before his next crib, though a certain inherited reticence suppressed the fact of the legacy.
“You’ll do that all right,” said Ascough, the head of the boot shop. “It’s quite the fashion just at present. Six Weeks in Wonderful Wood Street. They’re running excursions. . . .”
“A little holiday”; that was the form his sense of wealth took first, that it made a little holiday possible. Holidays were his life, and the rest merely adulterated living. And now he might take a little holiday and have money for railway fares and money for meals and money for inns. But—he wanted someone to take the holiday with.
For a time he cherished a design of hunting up Par-
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