And so one by one the winter days passed. January and February slipped away in snow and sleet, and March came in with a gale that whistled and moaned around the old house, and set loose blinds to swinging and loose gates to creaking in a way that was most trying to nerves already stretched to the breaking-point.
Pollyanna was not finding it very easy these days to play the game, but she was playing it faithfully, valiantly. Aunt Polly was not playing it at all – which certainly did not make it any the easier for Pollyanna to play it. Aunt Polly was blue and discouraged. She was not well, too, and she had plainly abandoned herself to utter gloom.
Pollyanna still was counting on the prize contest. She had dropped from the first prize to one of the smaller ones, however: Pollyanna had been writing more stories, and the regularity with which they came back from their pilgrimages to magazine editors was beginning to shake her faith in her success as an author.
“Oh, well, I can be glad that Aunt Polly doesn’t know anything about it, anyway,” declared Pollyanna to herself bravely, as she twisted in her fingers the “declined with thanks” slip that had just towed in one more shipwrecked story. “She can’t worry about this – she doesn’t know about it!”
All of Pollyanna’s life these days revolved around Aunt Polly, and it is doubtful if even Aunt Polly herself realized how exacting she had become, and how entirely her niece was giving up her life to her.
It was on a particularly gloomy day in March that matters came, in a way, to a climax. Pollyanna, upon arising, had looked at the sky with a sigh – Aunt Polly was always more difficult on cloudy days. With a gay little song, however, that still sounded a bit forced – Pollyanna descended to the kitchen and began to prepare breakfast.
“I reckon I’ll make corn muffins,” she told the stove confidentially; “then maybe Aunt Polly won’t mind – other things so much.”
Half an hour later she tapped at her aunt’s door.
“Up so soon? Oh, that’s fine! And you’ve done your hair yourself!”
“I couldn’t sleep. I had to get up,” sighed Aunt Polly wearily. “I had to do my hair, too. You weren’t here.”
“But I didn’t suppose you were ready for me, Auntie,” explained Pollyanna hurriedly. “Never mind, though. You’ll be glad I wasn’t when you find what I’ve been doing.”
“Well, I shan’t – not this morning,” frowned Aunt Polly perversely. “Nobody could be glad this morning. Look at it rain! That makes the third rainy day this week.”
“That’s so – but you know the sun never seems quite so perfectly lovely as it does after a lot of rain like this,” smiled Pollyanna, deftly arranging a bit of lace and ribbon at her aunt’s throat. “Now come. Breakfast’s all ready. Just you wait till you see what I’ve got for you.”
Aunt Polly, however, was not to be diverted, even by corn muffins, this morning. Nothing was right, nothing was even endurable, as she felt; and Pollyanna’s patience was sorely taxed before the meal was over. To make matters worse, the roof over the east attic window was found to be leaking, and an unpleasant letter came in the mail. Pollyanna, true to her creed, laughingly declared that, for her part, she was glad they had a roof – to leak; and that, as for the letter, she’d been expecting it for a week, anyway, and she was actually glad she wouldn’t have to worry any more for fear it would come. It couldn’t come now, because it had come; and ’twas over with.
All this, together with sundry other hindrances and annoyances, delayed the usual morning work until far into the afternoon – something that was always particularly displeasing to methodical Aunt Polly, who ordered her own life, preferably, by the tick of the clock.