The doll Gertrude put up both hands. “I want to laugh,” she cried, “won’t everybody please stop talking till I’ve had my laugh out. Thank you, thank you.”
“Why, that’s just like Aunt Gertrude,” Eleanor said. “Her voice has that kind of a sound like a bell, only more ripply.” 93
“Don’t be high-brow,” Jimmie’s lazy baritone besought with the slight burring of the “r’s” that Eleanor found so irresistible. “I’m only a poor hard-working, business man.”
The doll David took the floor deliberately. “We intend to devote the rest of our lives,” he said, “to the care of our beloved cooperative orphan.” On that he made a rather over mannered exit, Margaret planting each foot down deliberately until she flung him back in his box. “That’s the kind of a silly your Aunt Margaret is,” she continued, “but you mustn’t ever tell anybody, Eleanor.” She clasped the child again in one of her warm, sudden embraces, and Eleanor squeezing her shyly in return was altogether enraptured with her new existence.
“But there isn’t any doll for you, Aunt Margaret,” she cried.
“Oh! yes, there is, but I wasn’t going to show her to you unless you asked, because she’s so nice. I saved the prettiest one of all to be myself, not because I believe I’m so beautiful, but—but only because I’d like to be, Eleanor.”
“I always pretend I’m a princess,” Eleanor admitted. 94
The Aunt Margaret doll was truly a beautiful creation, a little more like Marie Antoinette than her namesake, but bearing a not inconsiderable resemblance to both, as Margaret pointed out, judicially analyzing her features.
Eleanor played with the rabbit doll only at night after this. In the daytime she looked rather battered and ugly to eyes accustomed to the delicate finish of creatures like the French manikins, but after she was tucked away in her cot in the passion flower dressing-room—all of Margaret’s belongings and decorations were a faint, pinky lavender,—her dear daughter Gwendolyn, who impersonated Albertina at increasingly rare intervals as time advanced, lay in the hollow of her arm and received her sacred confidences and ministrations as usual.