But Diana’s eyes were shining. “I shouldn’t have had Tom’s poem if I had been well,” she said, “or the Christmas egg. Even if one is sick, Christmas is the happiest time in all the year.”
CHAPTER XV
THE GREAT STORM
That was a winter of great storms. They began in November, and the snow piled up higher and higher, so that when one went down to the shops, one walked between walls of snow. The oldest inhabitant remembered nothing like it.
“It seems like going up mountains,” Peggy said to Alice, one day when they came to a house where the sidewalk had not been shoveled out.
It was a wonderful winter for children, for such coasting and tobogganing had never been known. It was not such a good winter for creatures who wore fur and feathers. Lady Janet, who had never known any other winter and did not realize that the oldest inhabitant had not known one like it, would return from an encounter with the snowflakes in dazed wonder and take her seat on a chair in front of the kitchen stove, or she would patiently watch by a mouse-hole for hours together.
The inhabitants of Hotel Hennery took life placidly, although they were confined to the hotel. But, having nothing more interesting to do, they turned their attention to laying eggs; after January set in, they all began to lay, so that Mrs. Owen and the children each had a fresh egg for breakfast most of the time.
The snow-storms grew more and more frequent as the winter passed, and the snow was deeper and deeper. It was all great fun for Alice and Peggy. They never tired of the coasting and the walk to and from school. It was hard for Diana, however, for in stormy or very cold weather she had to stay in the house. She was so much better after the summer that, in the autumn, she began to go to school. Diana was in the same room with Peggy, in the class below her. She had to be out of school almost half the time.