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THE TROUBLE IN LEAFY GREEN STREET
She went to the idol-shop in Moleshill Street, where the old man
mumbles, and said: "I want a god to worship when it is wet."
The old man reminded her of the heavy penalties that rightly attach
to idolatry and, when he had enumerated all, she answered him as
was meet: "Give me a god to worship when it is wet."
And he went to the back places of his shop and sought out and
brought her a god. The same was carved of grey stone and wore a
propitious look and was named, as the old man mumbled, The God
of Rainy Cheerfulness.
Now it may be that long confinement to the house affects adversely
the liver, or these things may be of the soul, but certain it is that on
a rainy day her spirits so far descended that those cheerful creatures
came within sight of the Pit, and, having tried cigarettes to no good
end, she bethought her of Moleshill Street and the mumbling man.
He brought the grey idol forth and mumbled of guarantees, although
he put nothing on paper, and she paid him there and then his
preposterous price and took the idol away.
And on the next wet day that there ever was she prayed to the
grey-stone idol that she had bought, the God of Rainy Cheerfulness
(who knows with what ceremony or what lack of it?), and so
brought down on her in Leafy Green Street, in the preposterous
house at the corner, that doom of which all men speak.
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