"But I wanted it to face toward the fire," drooped the May Girl, "like a village looking on the wonders of Vesuvius."
"Vesuvius nothing!" insisted Paul Brenswick. "It's got to have good drainage!"
Enchanted by his seriousness, the Bride rushed off up-stairs with her scissors to rip the foliage off her second-best hat to make a hedge for the church-yard. Even Allan John came sliding just a little bit out of his chair when he noted that there was a large, rather humpy papier-mache mountain in the outfit that seemed likely to be discarded.
"I would like to have that mountain put—there!" he pointed. "Against that table shadow . . . And the mountain's name is Blue Blurr!"
"Oh, very well," acquiesced everybody. "The mountain's name is Blue Blurr!" It was George Keets who suggested taking the little bronze Psyche from the mantelpiece to make a monument for the public square. "Of course there'll be some in your village," he deprecated, "who'll object to its being a nude. But as a classic it——"
"It's a bear! It's a bear! It's a bear!" chanted Kennilworth in exultant falsetto. "Speaking of classics!"
"Hush!" said George Keets. . . . George Keets really wanted very much to play, I think, but he didn't know exactly how to, so he tried to talk highbrow instead. "This village of yours," he frowned, "I—I hope it's going to have good government?"
"Well, it isn't!" snapped young Kennilworth. "It's going to be a terror! But at least it shall be pretty!"
Under young Kennilworth's crafty hand the little village certainly had bloomed from a child's pretty toy into the very real beauty of an artist's ideal. The skill of laying out little streets one way instead of another, the decision to place the tiny red schoolhouse here instead of there, the choice of a linden rather than a pinetree to shade an infinitesimal green-thatched cottage, had all combined in some curious twinge of charm to make your senses yearn—not that all that cunning perfection should swell suddenly to normal real estate dimensions—but that you, reduced by some lovely miracle to toy-size, might slip across that toy-sized greensward into one of those toy-sized houses, and live with toy-sized passions and toy-sized ambitions and toy-sized joys and toy-sized sorrows, one single hour of a toy-sized life.
Everybody, I guess, experienced the same strange little flutter.