Michael Malone - Weebly

her kickstand. Her age was such a rotten handicap—
while she was forced into an early bed, the rector ran
about getting invited to parties and slurping up
information right and left.
Sloan Highwick, however, never understood the
gossip; he simply collected it, just as Petrarch collected
the Greek manuscripts of Plato long before he found a
tutor to teach him how to translate them. Polly
Hedgerow was, in a way, the rector's tutor. But being
so young, her translations were sketchy at best, even
when news did come her way. For it was the "why," not
the "what," that intrigued her. Gossip to her was simply
a book (some of whose words sent her to the
dictionary) for whose hidden meaning she read between
the lines. This intellectual superiority to Highwick
consoled her now, for Polly was, in that regard, a bit of
a snob. And so she decided again not to share with
Highwick the biggest fact in all Dingley Falls, a fact that
she assumed no one but she had discovered (and she
by accident while digging for Indian arrowheads east of
Birch Forest). The fact that beyond the marshlands
somebody had built some kind of a U.S.