Mealy
Jones knew this, and he knew what Piggy did not know, that it would
have been a fight of two against one. So Piggy sat bolt upright in his
chair beside the black-and-red checked dress, and talked to the room
at large; but he spoke no word to the maiden at his side. She noticed
that Piggy kept dropping his knife, and the solicitude of her sex
prompted her to ask: "Are your hands cold, Winfield?"
And the instinct of his sex to hide a fault with a falsehood made
Piggy nod his head.
Then she answered: "Cold hands, a warm heart!"
At this important bit of repartee, the King of Boyville so forgot his
royal dignity that he let an orange-peel drive at Jimmy Sears, and
pretended not to hear her. His only reply was to joggle her arm when
she reached for the cake. Piggy was so exuberant and in such high
spirits that he put his plate on his chair and made Bud Perkins walk
turkey fashion three times around the room. He forgot the disgrace
which his note had brought to him in the school; he forgot the
pretensions of Mealy Jones; he did not wish to forget the episode of
the apple-tree, and for the time Piggy Pennington lived in a most
peculiar world, made of hazel eyes and red-ribboned pig-tails, all
circling around on a background of black-and-red checked flannel.
[Illustration: _At this important bit of repartee_.]
After that nothing mattered very much. It didn't matter that Piggy's
bruised feet began to sting like fire.
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