Mary Poppins

by P.L. Travers

But nobody ever knew what Mary Poppins felt about it, for Mary Poppins never told anybody anything. . . .

Mary Poppins was very vain and liked to look her best. Indeed, she was quite sure that she never looked anything else.

But Mary Poppins and the Match-Man smiled at one another. They knew, you see, what lay behind the trees. . . .

“Don’t you know,” she said pityingly, “that everybody’s got a Fairyland of their own?”

She was wearing her blue coat with the silver buttons and the blue hat to match, and on the days when she wore these it was the easiest thing in the world to offend her.

Mary Poppins put her hat straight at the Tobacconist’s Shop at the corner. It had one of those curious windows where there seem to be three of you instead of one, so that if you look long enough at them you begin to feel you are not yourself but a whole crowd of somebody else. Mary Poppins sighed with pleasure, however, when she saw three of herself, each wearing a blue coat with silver buttons and a blue hat to match. She thought it was such a lovely sight that she wished there had been a dozen of her or even thirty. The more Mary Poppins the better.

She knew very well that Mary Poppins never wasted time in being nice.