Chapter 3 - Page 2

"That's it," Tommy cried. "I tell yer, everybody dreams on it!" and
Tommy was right; everybody dreams of it, though not all call it Thrums.

On the whole, then, the coming of the kid, who turned out to be called
Elspeth, did not ostracize Tommy, but he wished that he had let the
other girl in, for he never doubted that her admittance would have kept
this one out. He told neither his mother nor his friend of the other
girl, fearing that his mother would be angry with him when she learned
what she had missed, and that Shovel would crow over his blundering, but
occasionally he took a side glance at the victorious infant, and a
poorer affair, he thought, he had never set eyes on. Sometimes it was
she who looked at him, and then her chuckle of triumph was hard to bear.
As long as his mother was there, however, he endured in silence, but the
first day she went out in a vain search for work (it is about as
difficult to get washing as to get into the Cabinet), he gave the infant
a piece of his mind, poking up her head with a stick so that she was
bound to listen.

"You thinks as it was clever on you, does yer? Oh, if I had been on the
stair!

"You needn't not try to get round me. I likes the other one five times
better; yes, three times better.

"Thievey, thievey, thief, that's her place you is lying in. What?

"If you puts out your tongue at me again--! What do yer say?

"She was twice bigger than you. You ain't got no hair, nor yet no teeth.
You're the littlest I ever seed. Eh? Don't not speak then, sulks!"

Prudence had kept him away from the other girl, but he was feeling a
great want: someone to applaud him. When we grow older we call it
sympathy. How Reddy (as he called her because she had beautiful
red-brown hair) had appreciated him! She had a way he liked of opening
her eyes very wide when she looked at him. Oh, what a difference from
that thing in the back of the bed!

Not the mere selfish desire to see her again, however, would take him in
quest of Reddy. He was one of those superior characters, was Tommy, who
got his pleasure in giving it, and therefore gave it. Now, Reddy was a
worthy girl. In suspecting her of overreaching him he had maligned her:
she had taken what he offered, and been thankful. It was fitting that he
should give her a treat: let her see him again.

His mother was at last re-engaged by her old employers, her supplanter
having proved unsatisfactory, and as the work lay in a distant street,
she usually took the kid with her, thus leaving no one to spy on Tammy's
movements. Reddy's reward for not playing him false, however, did not
reach her as soon as doubtless she would have liked, because the first
two