The kitchen door
slammed petulantly, enclosing the sore voice of Della, whereupon Penrod
and Duke seated themselves upon the pleasant sward and immediately
consumed the spoils of their raid.
From the cross-street which formed the side boundary of the Schofields'
ample yard came a jingle of harness and the cadenced clatter of a pair
of trotting horses, and Penrod, looking up, beheld the passing of a
fat acquaintance, torpid amid the conservative splendours of a rather
old-fashioned victoria. This was Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior, a
fellow sufferer at the Friday Afternoon Dancing Class, but otherwise not
often a companion: a home-sheltered lad, tutored privately and preserved
against the coarsening influences of rude comradeship and miscellaneous
information. Heavily overgrown in all physical dimensions, virtuous,
and placid, this cloistered mutton was wholly uninteresting to Penrod
Schofield. Nevertheless, Roderick Magsworth Bitts, Junior, was a
personage on account of the importance of the Magsworth Bitts family;
and it was Penrod's destiny to increase Roderick's celebrity far, far
beyond its present aristocratic limitations.
The Magsworth Bittses were important because they were impressive; there
was no other reason. And they were impressive because they believed
themselves important. The adults of the family were impregnably formal;
they dressed with reticent elegance, and wore the same nose and the
same expression--an expression which indicated that they knew something
exquisite and sacred which other people could never know.
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