“Break it to me!” echoed Polly, in superb disdain.  “My dear Fairy Godmother, you must think me a weak sort of person!  As if the burning down of one patrimonial estate could shatter my nerves!  What is a passing home or so?  Let it burn, by all means, if it likes.  ’He that is down need fear no fall.’”

“It is your only property,” said Mr. Bird, trying to present the other side of the case properly, “and it was not insured.”

“What of that?” she asked briskly.  “Am I not housed and fed like a princess at the present moment?  Have I not two hundred and fifty dollars in the bank, and am I not earning twenty-five dollars a month with absolute regularity?  Avaunt, cold Fear!”

“How was it that the house was not insured?” asked Mr. Bird.

“I ’m sure I don’t know.  It was insured once upon a time, if I remember right; when it got uninsured, I can’t tell.  How do things get uninsured, Mr. Bird?”

“The insurance lapses, of course, if the premium is n’t regularly paid.”

“Oh, that would account for it!” said Polly easily.  “There were quantities of things that were n’t paid regularly, though they were always paid in course of time.  You ought to have asked me if we were insured, Edgar,—­you were the boy of the house,—­insurance is n’t a girl’s department.  Let me see the telegrams, please.”

They all laughed heartily over Mrs. Greenwood’s characteristic message.

“Think of ‘husband’ bearing that aged ice-cream freezer and that leaky boiler to a place of safety!” exclaimed Polly. “’All that was left of them, left of six hundred!’ Well, my family portraits, piano, freezer, and boiler will furnish a humble cot very nicely in my future spinster days.  By the way, the land did n’t burn up, I suppose, and that must be good for something, is n’t it?”

“Rather,” answered Edgar; “a corner lot on the best street in town, four blocks from the new hotel site!  It’s worth eighteen hundred or two thousand dollars, at least.”

“Then why do you worry about me, good people?  I ’m not a heroine.  If I were sitting on the curbstone without a roof to my head, and did n’t know where I should get my dinner, I should cry!  But I smell my dinner” (here she sniffed pleasurably), “and I think it ’s chicken!  You see, it’s so difficult for me to realize that I ’m a pauper, living here, a pampered darling in the halls of wealth, with such a large income rolling up daily that I shall be a prey to fortune-hunters by the time I am twenty!  Pshaw! don’t worry about me!  This is just the sort of diet I have been accustomed to from my infancy!  I rather enjoy it!”

Whereupon Edgar recited an impromptu nonsense verse:—­

  “There ’s a queer little maiden named Polly,
  Who always knows when to be jolly. 
    When ruined by fire
    Her spirits rise higher. 
  This most inconsistent Miss Polly.”

CHAPTER XVI.