"If you don't, you know, you can't play," Grace Margaret reminded her.
"Awright," remarked Genevieve Maud, briefly. "Give toys to poor chil'ren."
They hurriedly left her before her noble purpose could do so, and Genevieve Maud, left to her own resources, made unctuous mud pies and fed them to her family. Grace Margaret and Helen Adeline returned in triumph within the hour and laid at the feet of their small victim modest offerings consisting of one armless rubber doll, one dirty and badly torn picture-book, and one top, broken.
"These is simple," declared Helen Adeline, with truth, "an' the poor
Murphy children has your pomps, Maudie. Are you glad?"
Genevieve Maud, surveying doubtfully the nondescript collection before her, murmured without visible enthusiasm something which was interpreted as meaning that she was glad. As a matter of fact, the charm of the simple life was not borne in upon her compellingly. The top she accepted until she discovered that it would not go. The rubber doll she declined to touch until Grace Margaret suggested that it had been in a hospital and had had its arms amputated like Mrs. Clark's son Charlie. Deeply moved by the pathos of this tragic fate, Genevieve Maud added the rubber doll to her aristocratic family, whose members seemed to shrink aside as it fell among them. The picture-book she declined to touch at all.
"It's dirty," she remarked, with an air of finality which effectually closed the discussion. By this time she was not herself an especially effective monument of cleanliness. The rice pudding and the mud pies had combined to produce a somewhat bizarre effect, and the dirt she had casually gathered from the paths, the flower-beds, and the hedges enlivened but did not improve the ensemble.
"She ought to be washed pretty soon," suggested Grace, surveying her critically; but to this tacit criticism Helen Adeline promptly took exception.
"They don't have to, so much," she objected, "when it's the simple life. That's one of the nice things."
With this decision Genevieve Maud was well content. Her tender years forbade hair-splitting and subtle distinctions; the term "accumulated dirt" or "old dirt" had no significance for her. She could not have told why she rejected the Murphy child's thoroughly grimed picture-book, yet herself rolled happily about in a thin coating of mud and dust, but she did both instinctively.
Her attention was pleasantly distracted by subdued cries from the street beyond the garden hedge. Three Italian women, all old, stood there gesticulating freely and signalling to the children, and a small ragged boy on crutches hovered nervously near them. Helen Adeline jumped to her feet with a sudden exclamation.