“No use taking the darling dolls home,” Georgia declared. “The new climate wouldn’t agree with them. No use packing them away in messy boxes, with books and pillows and pictures. By next fall the doll fever will be over.
“There can be doll dances in costume, and a doll play, if Madeline isn’t too famous to write one. The May-pole dancers can be dressed like dolls too.”
Fluffy sighed and interrupted: “Shan’t you mind at all parting with Wooden?”
“Not a bit,” returned Georgia, the matter-of-fact. “Let’s get a paper ready for the girls to sign, with the number of dolls they can furnish opposite their names.”
Straight signed for one doll without a murmur of protest, but it was not Rosa Marie that she put on the pile in Georgia’s borrowed express cart on the day of the May party. Not even to her beloved Fluffy did she confide her intention of never, never parting from her dear Rosa Marie.
The party was on the factory lawn, and the college part of it overflowed hungrily into the Tally-ho’s territory, or climbed up to view the animated scene comfortably from the Peter Pan’s upper stories. The doll dances and May dances came first, and then everybody gathered around the pile of dolls that rose like a haystack on the slope of the hill, while Babbie led the little girls one by one, beginning with the smallest and most forlorn and ragged, up to the pile to choose a doll. Georgia strutted like a peacock because Wooden was the very first one selected, and Fluffy refused to be comforted when the fat little Polander who had chosen her Esquimaux promptly sat down on it and cracked its skull.
“Never mind, dearie,” Straight consoled her. “Having dolls to smash is part of the fun of having them at all. Mr. Thayer will glue it together, and that child will never think about the crack.”
“It’s queer,” gulped Fluffy, “how fond you get of everything you have up here at college—your friends and your room, and even your footless little toys.”
“Because they’re the very last toys we’ll ever, ever have,” said Straight soberly. “Why didn’t you keep the Esquimaux, if you cared so much?”
“Because I kept the Baby and its nurse,” explained Fluffy shamefacedly. Whereupon Straight confessed to having bought a substitute for Rosa Marie, and the twins departed to the Tally-ho to celebrate their perfect harmony of spirit in cooling glasses of lemonade.