“Three wooden dolls, too!” said Mrs. Noah. “And one of them was going to be Queen, we were all told. It doesn’t seem to me as if the new King was acting quite right, it doesn’t.”
There were murmurs among the crowd. Mrs. Noah seemed to have hit upon a feeling that they all shared, more or less. “No, it isn’t right.” “There was hardly any sending to prison in Queen Rosebud’s time.” “They don’t look as if they had done anything wrong either.” “Nice kind faces, all of them!” These were a few of the speeches that reached Peggy’s ears from among the dolls who were all round her.
The Lord Chancellor still kept his good-natured expression of face, as if they were all making a great fuss about nothing, but he would put up with it for the sake of pleasing them. “Now, look here,” he said in a persuasive voice, “I think there’s a great deal in what you say, and I should be the last one to want to go against you. A more intelligent and intellectual-looking crowd I have seldom set eyes on, and it’s a real pleasure to address you.”
There were murmurs of approval, and one smartly dressed lady doll standing near to Peggy, said, “Lord Norval can be trusted. I know all about him, and I once met him at a garden party.”
“Now suppose we come to a compromise,” said the Lord Chancellor.
There were more murmurs of approval. Another lady doll near to Peggy asked, “What is a compromise?”
“Oh, don’t you know?” said the first lady doll. “It’s ‘If you give way, I’ll pretend to.’”
“What I suggest is this,” said the Lord Chancellor. “Let us all take these ladies to the House of Cards—it isn’t really like a prison at all, you know—and when we have made them comfortable there, and got them off our minds, then we’ll talk about what can be done. Now that strikes me as eminently fair.”
“Yes, that’s a compromise,” said the first lady doll, “and a very good one. But I knew that the Lord Chancellor could be trusted. A cook I once had had been kitchen maid to a great friend of his wife’s.”
Peggy did not think much of the Lord Chancellor’s compromise, but it seemed to satisfy the crowd, who greeted it with enthusiasm, and immediately made a way through for them, and went along with them. Peggy thought that Teddy would have seen that if they were once all shut up in prison it would be much more difficult to get them out again than to prevent their going there. But he said no more. With an encouraging wave of the paw he took himself off, followed by Mr. and Mrs. Noah, and was lost to view. Peggy felt a little sad, but only for a moment, because she couldn’t help treating the whole business as a sort of game; and everybody knows that whatever dreadful things happen in dolls’ games, everything always comes right in the end.