It was Rose, who still stood on the daïs, and was looking at them with a cruel joy, which she made no effort to disguise.
Her contemptuous gaze fell upon each of them in turn, but when she came to Peggy it turned into one of absolute ferocity. She stretched out her forefinger, and pointed at her. “Base human,” she addressed her. “I never thought to get you into my power, but now I have you you will rue the day when you came across the path of Rose, who never forgets and never forgives.”
“Tut! tut!” said the Lord Chancellor. “These are hard words, madam, and quite out of order.”
“Silence!” cried Rose, in a terrible voice, and flashing a terrible look at him from her dark and flaming eyes. And the Lord Chancellor shrugged his shoulders again, and kept silence, until she had finished her oration.
“Was it not enough,” she said, “that I should be born into the world over there as the property of a human child whom I despised and hated, but I must be treated by her with the grossest indignity?”
Peggy thought this was a little too much. She was not in the least frightened of Rose, nor of the King, nor of all the palace guards put together, and thought it would be rather amusing to go to a dolls’ prison, and see what it was like. But she was not going to be stormed at and told stories about by Rose.
“Why did you hate me?” she asked. “I was always kind to you, and I would have loved you if you had let me.”
Rose laughed her scornful laugh. “As if I wanted your love!” she exclaimed. “Or the love of any human child! I hate the whole tribe of them, and wish I could have them all over here, and tell them what I thought of them.”
“Oh, this is quite out of order, quite out of order,” said the Lord Chancellor fussily. “I wish you would finish what you have to say, madam, and let us get on with our work. You are keeping us all waiting.”
Rose took no notice of him, but went on. “You exchanged me,” she said, “for a battered wreck of a wooden doll, without a vestige of beauty such as mine, or indeed of any sort.”