Harriet the Spy: Chapters 15–16

Yes, I understand, and I agree with you, she always listened to her....Yes, a regression, yes....One thing more, Doctor, you’re sure?

She had covered her spy route in the first two days, giving ample time to each case, but there really hadn’t been much going on.

THAT WAS A SCENE l’M GLAD I SAW BECAUSE I WOULD HAVE GUESSED THAT MAMA DEI SANTI WOULD HAVE BOPPED HIM OVER THE HEAD BUT WHEN SHE SAW THE CHILDREN SHE BURST INTO TEARS AND COMMENCED WAILING AND GIVING THE KIDS EVERYTHING IN SIGHT.

Little Joe Curry was reinstated after he said he was just hungry.

As far as Harriet could see she hadn’t hit the bed since, but flew from one party to the next all day, did charity work incessantly, and, according to her phone conversations the next day, stayed out half the night too.

She leaned over the parapet again to study the problem at length.

Into the room, as though he owned it, to the accompaniment of loud cooing and baby talk from Harrison Withers walked the tiniest cat Harriet had ever seen.

It stopped, looked at Harrison Withers as though he were a curiosity, and then walked disdainfully across the room.

And, for some reason, as she walked home Harriet felt unaccountably happy.

“Oh, that’s easy. I’ve watched my mother lots of times,” said Marion authoritatively.

Rachel and Marion nodded curtly in her direction.

“Well...I do believe,” said her mother scrutinizing the letter, “that it’s a letter for you, Harriet.”

She decided suddenly to make a note of how she felt, so she wedged herself into a little niche usually reserved for a piece of sculpture.

In looking over all the compositions handed in by the class, Miss Whitehead and I have decided that several of you have a flair for writing and that these few should take turns having the editorship.

I would like to know when you have had the time, however, to amass this great tide of public opinion.

I want to make it perfectly clear that the only thing this vote will elicit is a talk with Miss Whitehead. I doubt very seriously that it is at all possible to change the decision.

Well, thought Harriet, I never thought I’d see the day when Pinky Whitehead would save my life. He looked back at her. She gave him a radiant smile and felt like a first-class hypocrite.

Harriet watched everyone put their papers away. Each one looked at Harriet surreptitiously as they did so, but she couldn’t tell anything by their faces.

Every single thing her mother and father said seemed to be important. Some of the things she didn’t understand, but they were none the less intriguing.

“What’s a retraction?" asked Harriet.
“Well, it’s like this. If a newspaper makes a mistake and they are told about it, then they print the fact that they have made a mistake and at the same time they print the correct information.”

That night when she went up to bed she took copious notes.

During the ensuing weeks the following entries held the class enthralled.

During the ensuing weeks the following entries held the class enthralled.

There is, of course, no kind of a cold in the world like this, but Harriet's mother had become convinced of this because it had happened to work so many times. Harriet knew just what signs of listlessness it took to put her mother’s mind into this track. She languished, therefore, until she heard her mother leave to go shopping.

Then she got up, stretched, and feeling very virtuous, she took a walk by the river.