antly genial in a floriferous but dingy flannel dressing gown, appeared to confirm that. He brought in his bicycle and put it in the narrow, empty passage, and everyone crowded into a small untidy kitchen, whose table had been hastily cleared of the débris of the midday repast.
“You must come in ’ere,” said Mrs. Larkins, “for Miriam’s turning out the front room. I never did see such a girl for cleanin’ up. Miriam’s ’oliday’s a scrub. You’ve caught us on the ’Op as the sayin’ is, but Welcome all the same. Pity Annie’s at work to-day; she won’t be ’ome till seven.”
Miriam put chairs and attended to the fire, Minnie edged up to Mr. Polly and said: “I am glad to see you again, Elfrid,” with a warm contiguous intimacy that betrayed a broken tooth. Mrs. Larkins got out tea things, and descanted on the noble simplicity of their lives, and how he “mustn’t mind our simple ways.” They enveloped Mr. Polly with a geniality that intoxicated his amiable nature; he insisted upon helping lay the things, and created enormous laughter by pretending not to know where plates and knives and cups ought to go. “Who’m I going to sit next?” he said, and developed voluminous amusement by attempts to arrange the plates so that he could rub elbows with all three. Mrs. Larkins had to sit down in the windsor chair by the grandfather clock (which was dark with dirt and not going) to laugh at her ease at his well-acted perplexity.
They got seated at last, and Mr. Polly struck a vein of
