'Polite and attentive!' sneered Ethelinda (and if you have never seen a doll sneer, you can have no idea how alarming it is). 'I don't call it an attention to be treated like a baby by a little chit of a girl who can't dress herself properly yet—no style, no elegance, and actually a pinafore in the mornings!'
This is the way some of these costly lady dolls talk about their benefactresses when the gas is out and they think no one overhears them. I don't know whether the plain old-fashioned ones, who are not so carefully treated, but often more tenderly loved, are as bad; but it is impossible to say—dolls are exceedingly artful, and there are persons, quite clever in other things, who will tell you honestly that they do not understand them in the least.
'Then the society here,' Ethelinda went on, without much consideration for the other's feelings—perhaps she thought he was too cheap to have any—'it's really something too dreadful for words. Why, those people in the poky little house over there, with only four rooms and a front door they can't open, have never had the decency to call upon me. Not that I should take any notice, of course, if they did, but it just shows what they are. And the other day I actually overheard one frightful creature in a print dress, with nothing on her head but a great tin-tack, ask another horror "which she liked best—make-believe tea or orange-juice!"'
'Well, I prefer make-believe tea myself,' said the jester, 'because, you see, I can't get the orange-juice down, and so it's rather bad for the dress and complexion.'
'Possibly,' she said scornfully. 'I'm thankful to say I've not been called upon to try it myself—even Miss Winifred knows better than that. But, anyhow, it's horribly insipid here, and I suppose it will be like this always now. I did hope once that when I went out into the world I should be a heroine and have a romance of my own.'
'What is a romance?' he asked.
'I thought you wouldn't understand me,' she said; 'a romance is—well, there's champagne in it, and cigarettes, to begin with.'
'But what is champagne?' he interrupted.
'Something you drink,' she said; 'what else could it be?'
'I see,' he said; 'a sort of orange-juice.'