Polly and Her Pals — "Can a Circle Be Squared?"

Four panels follow two fashionable young women who conspicuously exclude a neighbor named Lettie from their party. A small, exasperated man—likely Polly's father Paw—demands to know why; the girls retort that Lettie "lives in our square" but definitively "is not in our circle." The punchline hinges on a geometric pun, delivered deadpan while Paw sputters in a striped chair. Sterrett's draftsmanship is unusually fluid for newspaper dailies: the women's silhouettes are gestural and elongated, speech balloons tight and rhythmic. *Polly and Her Pals*, launched in 1912 by the New York *Evening Telegram*, pioneered the recurring-cast domestic strip format whose panel-and-balloon grammar directly seeded the first comic book reprints of the 1930s.