“You’re not Princess Lalla! You’re Sally Ford, play-acting! Oh, Sally, I’m so glad I found you! Hey, kids! Kids! It’s Sally Ford, play-acting!”
For a terrible moment, long enough for Gus, the barker, to jump from Jan’s platform and come toward her on a run, Sally sat frozen with terror. She felt that Betsy’s keen eyes had stripped her of her brown make-up, of her fantastic clothes, of the protecting black veil, so that anyone who looked at her could see that she was indeed “just Sally Ford, play-acting.”
She wanted to rise from her gilded chair and run for her life—and David’s—but she had lost all control of her muscles. Betsy was still clinging to her, her babyish hands shaking the slender shoulders under the green satin jacket, when Gus bounded upon the platform and took the almost hysterical child into his arms.
“Hello, Tiddlywinks!” he sang out jovially. “Having a good time at the carnival? Listen, kiddie! I’m going to give you a real treat! Yessir! You know what you’re going to do? Just guess!”
Sally felt the blood begin to thaw in her frozen veins. Gus was standing by. Dear Gus! But Gus was too wise to give the child in his arms a chance to reply. He hurried on, his voice loud and cajoling:
“I’m going to let you stand right up on the platform with the little lady midget—her name’s ‘Pitty Sing’—and show all the other kids how much bigger you are than a grown-up lady. Yessir, she’s a grown-up lady and she’s not nearly as big as you. Now what do you think of that?”
Betsy was torn between her love for Sally, whom she was convinced she had found, and her pride in being chosen to stand beside the midget. She looked doubtfully from Sally, whose eyes beneath the black lace veil were lowered to her tightly locked hands, to the platform opposite, where “Pitty Sing,” the midget, was stretching out a tiny hand invitingly. The midget won, for the moment at least.
“I’m six, going on seven, and I’m a big girl,” she confided to the barker on whose shoulder she was riding in delightful conspicuousness.
The children, true to the herd instinct which had been so highly developed in the orphanage, trooped after Gus and Betsy, even more easily diverted than she from their pop-eyed inspection of “Princess Lalla.”
Sally heard Thelma answer another child derisively: “Aw, Betsy’s off her nut! Sure that ain’t Sally! That’s a Turkish princess from Con-stan-ti-no-ple. The man said so. ‘Sides, Sally’s white, and the princess is brown—”