“I should think people would ha’ been mad to see the king hogging everything for himself,” Jimmy said vigorously.
“Oh, they were used to it,” explained Sally. “They thought it had to be that way. All the learned men in those days told them that everything would go to pieces and everybody would rob and murder everybody else if they didn’t have a king and think they loved him more than anybody else.”
Once more Jimmy’s sense of the probable rose up to protest, “They didn’t love that old hog-it-all king!” The little twentieth-century American brain refused to credit this ridiculous and inherently impossible idea.
( ... and yet how many generations of men suffered and died to affirm that idea as the natural and inevitable foundation of society!)
“Well, they thought they had to, and so they thought they did,” said Sally lucidly. “The way we love our governments now. But after a couple of hundred years or so they found out the learned men didn’t know so much, and that it wasn’t having a king that kept folks from robbing and murdering all the time. So they got together and came out here from Paris and took all this away from him. And that’s how we get in to play.”
Jimmy’s fancy was tickled by a new idea. “I bet he’d be surprised if he could see us playing here.”
Sally dramatized the scene, instantly. “Wouldn’t he though! Suppose he should come walking right down those marble steps with his high wig and his big-buckled shoes, and his clothes all solid gold and diamonds, and suppose he should walk right up to us and say, ‘You good-for-nothing common-people, what are you doing in MY park? I’ll have you boiled in oil at once!’”
Jimmy was a little intimidated. He took his big sister’s hand and said in rather a small voice, “What would you say back?”
Sally made a dramatic gesture of scorn. “I’d say, ‘Get away from here, you old King. Don’t you know you’re dead?’ And then, Jimmy, you know ghosts aren’t solid. I’d just draw off and run right through him, gold clothes and diamonds and all, like this.”
She executed a headlong assault on space and came back laughing.