“Oh, my dear!” Elsie exclaimed. “Why, my dear, I haven’t sat down since Christmus!”
Thus they enacted a little drama, improvising the dialogue, for of course every child is both playwright and actor, and spends most of his time acting in scenes of his own invention—which is one reason that going to school may be painful to him; lessons are not easily made into plays, though even the arithmetic writers do try to help a little, with their dramas of grocers and eggs, and farmers and bushels and quarts. A child is a player, and an actor is a player; and both “play” in almost the same sense—the essential difference being that the child’s art is instinctive, so that he is not so conscious of just where reality begins and made-up drama ends. Daisy and Elsie were now representing and exaggerating their two mothers, with a dash of aunt thrown in; they felt that they were the grown people they played they were; and the more they developed these “secondary personalities,” the better they believed in them.
“An’ with all my trouble an’ everything,” Daisy said, “I jus’ never get a minute to myself. Even my shopping, it’s all for the fam’ly.”
“So’s mine,” Elsie said promptly. “Mine’s every single bit for the fam’ly, an’ I never, never get through.”
“Well, look at me!” Daisy exclaimed, her hands fluttering in movements she believed to be illustrative of the rush she lived in. “My fam’ly keep me on the run from the minute I get up till after I go to bed. I declare I don’t get time to say my prayers! To-day I thought I might get a little rest for once in my life. But no! I haf to go shopping!”
“So do I, my dear! I haf to look at—— Well, what do you haf to look at when we go in the stores?”
“Me? I haf to look at everything! There isn’t a thing left in our house. I haf to look at doilies, an’ all kinds embrawdries, an’ some aperns for the servants, an’ taffeta, an’ two vases for the liberry mantelpice, an’ some new towerls, an’ kitchen-stove-polish, an’ underwear, an’ oilcloth, an’ lamp-shades, an’ some orstrich feathers for my blue vevvut hat. An’ then I got to get some——”
“Oh, my dear! I got more’n that I haf to look at,” Elsie interrupted. And she, likewise, went into details; but as Daisy continued with her own, and they both talked at the same time, the effect was rather confused, though neither seemed to be at all disturbed on that account. Probably they were pleased to think they were thus all the more realistically adult.
It was while they were chattering in this way that Master Laurence Coy came wandering along a side-street that crossed their route, and, catching sight of them, considered the idea of joining them. He had a weakness for Elsie, and an antipathy for Daisy, the latter feeling sometimes not unmingled with the most virulent repulsion; but there was a fair balance struck; in order to be with Elsie, he could bear being with Daisy. Yet both were girls, and, regarded in that light alone, not the company he cared to be thought of as deliberately choosing. Nevertheless, he had found no boys at home that morning; he was at a loss what to do with himself, and bored. Under these almost compulsory circumstances, he felt justified in consenting to join the ladies; and, overtaking them at the crossing, he stopped and spoke to them.
“Hay, there,” he said, taking care not to speak too graciously. “Where you two goin’, talkin’ so much?”