They promised to her cheerfully.
“An’ le’s make ice-cream an’ have a p-p-party.”
They set to work to obey her.
They spread tea-towels over two chairs and laid out their best dinner-set that contained a soup-tureen and a sauce-boat in addition to the usual things. Phyl made soup of three currants and weak tea, Dolly cut an apple into thin slices, arranged them in slanting piles on a small plate, and called it bread-and-butter.
Weenie herself stirred flour-and-water and sugar together into a lump of dough and then stuck four currants into it; that was the pudding. Phyl mixed sugar-and-water together for sauce.
Then came the chef-d’œuvre. They listened at the door to make sure no footsteps approached; then Dolly stealthily opened the window, leaned out and got a handful or two of snow from the creeper outside. They put it on a plate and stirred sugar into it; then they reached down the precious bottle of cochineal their mother had given them, and coloured it a pale, lovely pink.
They dressed all the dolls in their very best and brought them to the feast. Even Weenie’s “Molly Coddles” was hunted up and introduced into a [95] ]garment. She was Weenie’s only doll—a gaunt, wooden one with a black painted head and vividly red cheeks.
In the beginning she had possessed the jointed wooden legs and arms that are usually found on her species; but Weenie had thought them troublesome and pulled them off. The stump of a body and the big head she used variously as a horse, a hammer, a ship, and a missile. Dolly to-day, however, wrapped the poor wreck in Jennie’s second-best party cloak, and she was propped up at the table among her betters.
How delicious was that pink ice-cream, eaten off inch-wide plates, with microscopic tin spoons! What delicate flavour that soup had, especially when Phyl chopped up very small a leaf of the outside creeper and made the effect still more realistic? Nothing could have been more enjoyable than that rather dirty-looking ball of dough, yclept a pudding, with the sweet sauce, also coloured pink, poured over it.
Weenie was beamingly happy again, and Phyl and Dolly were enjoying themselves so intensely that all thought of the counterpane faded from their minds.