'Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and one to finish with, and
all that, understood. Hooray, hooray, hooray!--And now, Jack,
let's have a little talk about Pussy. Two pairs of nut-crackers?
Pass me one, and take the other.' Crack. 'How's Pussy getting on
Jack?'
'With her music? Fairly.'
'What a dreadfully conscientious fellow you are, Jack! But _I_
know, Lord bless you! Inattentive, isn't she?'
'She can learn anything, if she will.'
'IF she will! Egad, that's it. But if she won't?'
Crack!--on Mr. Jasper's part.
'How's she looking, Jack?'
Mr. Jasper's concentrated face again includes the portrait as he
returns: 'Very like your sketch indeed.'
'I AM a little proud of it,' says the young fellow, glancing up at
the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking
a corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in
the air: 'Not badly hit off from memory. But I ought to have
caught that expression pretty well, for I have seen it often
enough.'
Crack!--on Edwin Drood's part.
Crack!--on Mr. Jasper's part.
'In point of fact,' the former resumes, after some silent dipping
among his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, 'I see it
whenever I go to see Pussy. If I don't find it on her face, I
leave it there.--You know I do, Miss Scornful Pert. Booh!' With a
twirl of the nut-crackers at the portrait.
Crack! crack! crack.
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