Лучшие рассказы О. Генри = The Best of O. Henry

Avaunt[48 - Avaunt! = Go away! Off with you!], Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen[49 - Helen – Helen of Troy, a beauty, the cause of the Trojan War] herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fat is meat for perdition. There was never a chance for you, Hoover.

As Mrs. Parker’s roomers sat thus one summer’s evening, Miss Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:

“Why, there’s Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too.”

All looked up – some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting about for an airship, Jackson-guided.

“It’s that star,” explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. “Not the big one that twinkles – the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson.”

“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker. “I didn’t know you were an astronomer, Miss Leeson.”

“Oh, yes,” said the small star gazer, “I know as much as any of them about the style of sleeves they’re going to wear next fall in Mars.

”

“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker. “The star you refer to is Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia[50 - Cassiopeia – a constellation in the Milky Way Galaxy]. It is nearly of the second magnitude, and its meridian passage is —”

“Oh,” said the very young Mr. Evans, “I think Billy Jackson is a much better name for it.”

“Same here,” said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to Miss Longnecker.

“I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to name stars as any of those old astrologers had.”

“Well, really!” said Miss Longnecker.

“I wonder whether it’s a shooting star,” remarked Miss Dorn. “I hit nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday.”

“He doesn’t show up very well from down here,” said Miss Leeson. “You ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars even in the daytime from the bottom of a well.

At night my room is like the shaft of a coal mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with.”

There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidable papers home to copy. And when she went out in the morning, instead of working, she went from office to office and let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent office boys. This went on.