Margaret put her arm about the child after the ordeal of the first dinner at the big table.
“Father does not bite,” she said, “but Grandfather does. The others are quite harmless. If Grandfather shows his teeth, run for your life.”
“I don’t know where to run to,” Eleanor answered seriously, whereupon Margaret hugged her. Her Aunt Margaret would have been puzzling to Eleanor beyond any hope of extrication, but for the quick imagination that unwound her riddles almost as she presented them. For one terrible minute Eleanor had believed that Hugh 91 Hutchinson senior did bite, he looked so much like some of the worst of the pictures in Little Red Riding Hood.
“While you are here I’m going to pretend you’re my very own child,” Margaret told Eleanor that first evening, “and we’ll never, never tell anybody all the foolish games we play and the things we say to each other. I can just barely manage to be grown up in the bosom of my family, and when I am in the company of your esteemed Aunt Beulah, but up here in my room, Eleanor, I am never grown up. I play with dolls.”
“Oh! do you really?”
“I really do,” Margaret said. She opened a funny old chest in the corner of the spacious, high studded chamber. “And here are some of the dolls that I play with.” She produced a manikin dressed primly after the manner of eighteen-thirty, prim parted hair over a small head festooned with ringlets, a fichu, and mits painted on her fingers. “Beulah,” she said with a mischievous flash of a grimace at Eleanor. “Gertrude,”—a dashing young brunette in riding clothes. “Jimmie,”—a curly haired dandy. “David,”—a serious creature with 92 a monocle. “I couldn’t find Peter,” she said, “but we’ll make him some day out of cotton and water colors.”
“Oh! can you make dolls?” Eleanor cried in delight, “real dolls with hair and different colored eyes?”
“I can make pretty good ones,” Margaret smiled; “manikins like these,—a Frenchwoman taught me.”
“Oh; did she? And do you play that the dolls talk to each other as if they was—were the persons?”
“Do I?” Margaret assembled the four manikins into a smart little group. The doll Beulah rose,—on her forefinger. “I can’t help feeling,” mimicked Margaret in a perfect reproduction of Beulah’s earnest contralto, “that we’re wasting our lives,—criminally dissipating our forces.”