Aladdin and the Boss Cockie (cover imaged--add text): (1920)

ALADDIN RUBS THE LAMP.
decided not to let this prize slip; scruples should not
stand in the way, nor uncertainties—he would do
possible evil that certain good might come.
Dubbin hung around the sitting-room so that
Vera Pardon deserted it; but if she trdated coolly
the man she disliked, her reception of the man she
liked was antarctic. Without intending so to do,
Aladdin had done the best thing possible to soften
her. She ascribed his daily absences to her own
treatment of him, and so far relented that on this
Jay she opened the conversation. The weather, of
course; then the date of the charity performance
dependent on that weather; then the rehearsals;
then the principals lastly, naturally, and inevi-
—
tably, each other.
Judy later seeing them, their heads very nigh one
-
another looking over the big family album of photo
graphs, giggled sympathetically and joyously—being
that eternal matchmaker—a woman.
"That is uncle," said Vera Pardon, pointing to
a photograph of the Boss Cockie, very stern in very
new and uncomfortable clothes. "That's auntie.
And that's Judy when she was a baby—they're not
good photos—they were all taken by travelling
photographers."
"They're very interesting," said Aladdin.
`Where are you?"
She turned the insets over a dozen weird and
faded portraits of the people of thirty-five years ago
—cabbage-tree hats for white mole -skinned, spurred
and bearded bush dandies; wide skirts and bustles,
fearsome bonnets, sternly folded shawls, tasselled
fichus and formal dolmans of their women; and
stopped at a photograph of herself of two years ago
-black-dressed, slight, slim, pathetic—looking more
seventeen than the twenty years that had then been
hers.
"May I?" whispered Aladdin.
"What?"
"May I keep it?"
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