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THE SIEGE
83

"I thought that the Lump would bother you, sir, and you wouldn't know what to give him for dinner," said Pollyooly.

"You thought the Lump would bother me and I shouldn't know what to give him for dinner! So you crawl along a sloping roof, sixty feet from the ground to get to us!" cried the Honorable John Ruffin in a tone of stupefaction.

"He might have had indigestion," said Pollyooly.

The Honorable John Ruffin raised both hands toward the ceiling, and cried loudly, "I tell you, Pollyooly, that the female sex is one of the most remarkable phenomena that crawl about the earth!"

"Yes, sir," said Pollyooly in amiable assent

She did not resent the doubtful tribute to her sex; she did not understand it. That did not matter; often she did not understand the Honorable John Ruffin. None the less she did not doubt that he was right. She took the eager Lump up to their attic to give him his dinner.

She had barely reached their attic when there came the tramp of many feet on the staircase. The policeman, in a rapture at having something to do, was coming to express his disapproval of Pollyooly's