“Well, when he comes up with a flip of his tail, you must jump for the pail of mortar and sprinkle it on him, and he’ll be so mortified that he’ll die of mortification.”
“And must you hold him by the tail? You said ‘catch and kill,’” Dorothy reminded her.
Eugenia nodded. “But it’s never been done yet. The tail is prickly, you see, and slippery between the pricks, and the pink shoe-string gets in your eyes.”
“How could it?” demanded Dorothy.
“It’s enchanted,” Eugenia assured her with the air of finality that little girls love. “And so this is how you catch and kill a ploshkin.”
“Could you please make me a picture of a ploshkin?” asked Dorothy on the third night of the story.
“I can’t draw pictures, dear, but Miss Ayres will, I’m sure,” Eugenia told her, and that was how Madeline heard of the ploshkin, and fell so in love with its name, its ingrowing face, and its prickly, slippery tail, that she spent a whole morning making sketches of it, when she should have been pursuing her Literary Career.
Dorothy displayed the sketches to all her friends, and the exact appearance of the ploshkin began to be vigorously discussed in college circles, and pictures of it adorned the fly-leaves of note-books and the margins of corrected themes. The fluffy-haired Dutton twin, who took modeling, even made a comical little clay ploshkin and presented it to Dorothy, who thanked her and tactfully refrained from mentioning that she had forgotten the prickly tail. But Madeline was not so reticent, and she and the Dutton twin together modeled another figure that made Dorothy fairly dance with delight. It had, besides the prickly tail, one wing, held coquettishly before its “ingrowing face,” which was rather like a fish’s, except for a “sunny Jim” smile around the mouth; and there was something inexplicably fascinating about the grotesque huddle of its posture.
“That’s a real touch of genius—that makes you feel like laughing whenever you look at it,” explained the Dutton twin triumphantly, “but it won’t help me any if I cut again in Elocution. Good-bye,” and she was off, singing, “Midyears are coming, tra-la, tra-la,” with a joyous disregard for time and tune.
While the others were still admiring the new ploshkin Mary Brooks appeared.