Page 121 - pollyanna

The little girl laughed.
‘Maybe. But what I mean is, that legs don’t last—broken
ones, you know—like lifelong invalids, same as Mrs. Snow
has got. So yours won’t last till doomsday at all. I should
think you could be glad of that.’
‘Oh, I am,’ retorted the man grimly.
‘And you didn’t break but one. You can be glad ‘twasn’t
two.’ Pollyanna was warming to her task.
‘Of course! So fortunate,’ sniffed the man, with uplifted
eyebrows; ‘looking at it from that standpoint, I suppose I
might be glad I wasn’t a centipede and didn’t break fifty!’
Pollyanna chuckled.
‘Oh, that’s the best yet,’ she crowed. ‘I know what a centi-
pede is; they’ve got lots of legs. And you can be glad—‘
‘Oh, of course,’ interrupted the man, sharply, all the old
bitterness coming back to his voice; ‘I can be glad, too, for
all the rest, I suppose—the nurse, and the doctor, and that
confounded woman in the kitchen!’
‘Why, yes, sir—only think how bad ‘twould be if you
DIDN’T have them!’
‘Well, I—eh?’ he demanded sharply.
‘Why, I say, only think how bad it would be if you didn’t
have ‘em—and you lying here like this!’
‘As if that wasn’t the very thing that was at the bottom of
the whole matter,’ retorted the man, testily, ‘because I am
lying here like this! And yet you expect me to say I’m glad
because of a fool woman who disarranges the whole house
and calls it ‘regulating,’ and a man who aids and abets her
in it, and calls it ‘nursing,’ to say nothing of the doctor who

1 0 Pollyanna