Pollyanna Grows Up
Copyright© 2025 by Eleanor H. Porter
Chapter 25: The Game and Pollyanna
Before the middle of September the Carews and Sadie Dean said good-by and went back to Boston. Much as she knew she would miss them, Pollyanna drew an actual sigh of relief as the train bearing them away rolled out of the Beldingsville station. Pollyanna would not have admitted having this feeling of relief to any one else, and even to herself she apologized in her thoughts.
“It isn’t that I don’t love them dearly, every one of them,” she sighed, watching the train disappear around the curve far down the track. “It’s only that—that I’m so sorry for poor Jamie all the time; and—and—I am tired. I shall be glad, for a while, just to go back to the old quiet days with Jimmy.”
Pollyanna, however, did not go back to the old quiet days with Jimmy. The days that immediately followed the going of the Carews were quiet, certainly, but they were not passed “with Jimmy.” Jimmy rarely came near the house now, and when he did call, he was not the old Jimmy that she used to know. He was moody, restless, and silent, or else very gay and talkative in a nervous fashion that was most puzzling and annoying. Before long, too, he himself went to Boston; and then of course she did not see him at all.
Pollyanna was surprised then to see how much she missed him. Even to know that he was in town, and that there was a chance that he might come over, was better than the dreary emptiness of certain absence; and even his puzzling moods of alternating gloominess and gayety were preferable to this utter silence of nothingness. Then, one day, suddenly she pulled herself up with hot cheeks and shamed eyes.
“Well, Pollyanna Whittier,” she upbraided herself sharply, “one would think you were in LOVE with Jimmy Bean Pendleton! Can’t you think of ANYTHING but him?”
Whereupon, forthwith, she bestirred herself to be very gay and lively indeed, and to put this Jimmy Bean Pendleton out of her thoughts. As it happened, Aunt Polly, though unwittingly, helped her to this.
With the going of the Carews had gone also their chief source of immediate income, and Aunt Polly was beginning to worry again, audibly, about the state of their finances.
“I don’t know, really, Pollyanna, what IS going to become of us,” she would moan frequently. “Of course we are a little ahead now from this summer’s work, and we have a small sum from the estate right along; but I never know how soon that’s going to stop, like all the rest. If only we could do something to bring in some ready cash!”
It was after one of these moaning lamentations one day that Pollyanna’s eyes chanced to fall on a prize-story contest offer. It was a most alluring one. The prizes were large and numerous. The conditions were set forth in glowing terms. To read it, one would think that to win out were the easiest thing in the world. It contained even a special appeal that might have been framed for Pollyanna herself.
“This is for you—you who read this,” it ran. “What if you never have written a story before! That is no sign you cannot write one. Try it. That’s all. Wouldn’t YOU like three thousand dollars? Two thousand? One thousand? Five hundred, or even one hundred? Then why not go after it?”
“The very thing!” cried Pollyanna, clapping her hands. “I’m so glad I saw it! And it says I can do it, too. I thought I could, if I’d just try. I’ll go tell auntie, so she needn’t worry any more.”
Pollyanna was on her feet and half way to the door when a second thought brought her steps to a pause.
“Come to think of it, I reckon I won’t, after all. It’ll be all the nicer to surprise her; and if I SHOULD get the first one—!”
Pollyanna went to sleep that night planning what she COULD do with that three thousand dollars.
Pollyanna began her story the next day. That is, she, with a very important air, got out a quantity of paper, sharpened up half-a-dozen pencils, and established herself at the big old-fashioned Harrington desk in the living-room. After biting restlessly at the ends of two of her pencils, she wrote down three words on the fair white page before her. Then she drew a long sigh, threw aside the second ruined pencil, and picked up a slender green one with a beautiful point. This point she eyed with a meditative frown.
“O dear! I wonder WHERE they get their titles,” she despaired. “Maybe, though, I ought to decide on the story first, and then make a title to fit. Anyhow, I’M going to do it.” And forthwith she drew a black line through the three words and poised the pencil for a fresh start.
The start was not made at once, however. Even when it was made, it must have been a false one, for at the end of half an hour the whole page was nothing but a jumble of scratched-out lines, with only a few words here and there left to tell the tale.
At this juncture Aunt Polly came into the room. She turned tired eyes upon her niece.
“Well, Pollyanna, what ARE you up to now?” she demanded.
Pollyanna laughed and colored guiltily.
“Nothing much, auntie. Anyhow, it doesn’t look as if it were much—yet,” she admitted, with a rueful smile. “Besides, it’s a secret, and I’m not going to tell it yet.”
“Very well; suit yourself,” sighed Aunt Polly. “But I can tell you right now that if you’re trying to make anything different out of those mortgage papers Mr. Hart left, it’s useless. I’ve been all over them myself twice.”
“No, dear, it isn’t the papers. It’s a whole heap nicer than any papers ever could be,” crowed Pollyanna triumphantly, turning back to her work. In Pollyanna’s eyes suddenly had risen a glowing vision of what it might be, with that three thousand dollars once hers.
For still another half-hour Pollyanna wrote and scratched, and chewed her pencils; then, with her courage dulled, but not destroyed, she gathered up her papers and pencils and left the room.
“I reckon maybe I’ll do better by myself up-stairs,” she was thinking as she hurried through the hall. “I THOUGHT I ought to do it at a desk—being literary work, so—but anyhow, the desk didn’t help me any this morning. I’ll try the window seat in my room.”
The window seat, however, proved to be no more inspiring, judging by the scratched and re-scratched pages that fell from Pollyanna’s hands; and at the end of another half-hour Pollyanna discovered suddenly that it was time to get dinner.
“Well, I’m glad ‘tis, anyhow,” she sighed to herself. “I’d a lot rather get dinner than do this. Not but that I WANT to do this, of course; only I’d no idea ‘twas such an awful job—just a story, so!”
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