'
Laying an affectionate and laughing touch on the boy's extended
hand, as if it were at once his giddy head and his light heart, Mr.
Jasper drinks the toast in silence.
'Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and one to finish with, and
all that, understood. Hooray, hooray, hooray! - And now, Jack,
let's have a little talk about Pussy. Two pairs of nut-crackers?
Pass me one, and take the other.' Crack. 'How's Pussy getting on
Jack?'
'With her music? Fairly.'
'What a dreadfully conscientious fellow you are, Jack! But I know,
Lord bless you! Inattentive, isn't she?'
'She can learn anything, if she will.'
'IF she will! Egad, that's it. But if she won't?'
Crack! - on Mr. Jasper's part.
'How's she looking, Jack?'
Mr. Jasper's concentrated face again includes the portrait as he
returns: 'Very like your sketch indeed.'
'I AM a little proud of it,' says the young fellow, glancing up at
the sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking
a corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in
the air: 'Not badly hit off from memory. But I ought to have
caught that expression pretty well, for I have seen it often
enough.'
Crack! - on Edwin Drood's part.
Crack! - on Mr. Jasper's part.
'In point of fact,' the former resumes, after some silent dipping
among his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, 'I see it
whenever I go to see Pussy. If I don't find it on her face, I
leave it there. - You know I do, Miss Scornful Pert.
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