Brisk, bleak, absolutely literal, the frosted roofs and gables of a pleasant suburban landscape gleamed sociably at her through every casement window.
No squawking pelicans screeched like steam-whistles into her splitting eardrums. No interminable flights of sea gulls dragged their sharp-feathered wingpoints across her naked eyeballs. On the slime and stench of a dead shark's body her little foot had forever stopped slipping.
"Why—why, how—perfectly extraordinary!" woke Daphne.
It seemed to be a pretty room. A little too neat, perhaps, a little too impersonal, to be one's very own. But by no means as plushily impersonal as a hotel, and by no means as poison-neat as a hospital.
"Wherever—in—the world—am I?" puzzled Daphne. 225
Very cautiously, very experimentally, she began to investigate her most immediate surroundings.
"I am at least in a very pretty—pale blue—wadded silk wrapper," she discovered with eminent satisfaction. "Also, on an astonishingly comfortable couch with at least a hundred pillows . . . . Oh—I hope the bow on my pigtail matches my pale blue wrapper!" she quickened expectantly. But there was no pigtail. Shockingly to her uplifted hands her short-cropped head loomed round and crisp and fluffy as a great worsted ball. "Oh, dear— oh, dear—oh, dear!" she gasped. "If I am dead and born again—I am a boy!" Wilting down discouragedly into her "hundred pillows" one slender hand dropped weakly to the floor. "Life is very empty," she said. "Everything in life is very empty—everything." Along her sluggish spine a curious little thrill passed suddenly. "There is a nose in my hand!" she gasped. "A lovin' nose! 226 Creep-Mouse!" she cried out desperately. "Is it—possible that it's your lovin' nose?"
"Perfectly possible!" thudded Creep-Mouse's essentially practical tail. "Perfectly possible," swished and fawned the bashful little fur body.
"This is certainly very extraordinary," struggled Daphne. "Instead of being anything that I thought it was, it is quite evidently some sort of a bewitchment. I am a boy! But Creep-Mouse is still Creep-Mouse! I who went to sleep real have waked up in a Fairy Story! But what Fairy Story?" she shivered. "And what page?"
Quite inadvertently her eyes strayed to the little white table at the head of her couch. In the middle of the table shone a silver bell.