“We won’t save it,” said John Holt. “We’ll go now. We will hobnob with Bedouins and Japanese and Turks, and shake hands with Amazons and Indians; we’ll ride on camels and go to the Chinese Theatre. Come along.”
And to this Arabian Nights’ Entertainment he took them all. They felt as if he were a prince. And oh, the exciting strangeness of it! To be in such a place and amid such marvels, with a man who seemed to set no limit to the resources of his purse. They never had been even near a person who spent money as if it were made for spending, and the good things of life were made to be bought by it. What John Holt spent was only what other people with full purses spent in the Midway Plaisance, but to Meg and Robin and Ben it seemed that he poured forth money in torrents. They looked at him with timorous wonder and marvelling gratitude. It seemed that he meant them to see everything and to do everything. They rode on camels down a street in Cairo, they talked to chiefs of the desert, they listened to strange music, they heard strange tongues, and tasted strange confections. Robin and Ben went about like creatures in a delightful dream. Every few minutes during the first hour Robin would sidle close to Meg, and clutch her dress or her hand with a gasp of rapture.
“Oh, Meg!” he would say, “and yesterday we were so poor! And now we are seeing everything!”
And when John Holt heard him, he would laugh half to himself; a laugh with a touch of pleasant exultation in it, and no gloom at all. He had found something to distract him at last.
He liked to watch Meg’s face, as they went from one weirdly foreign place to another. Her eyes were immense with delight, and her face had the flush of an Indian peach. Once she stopped suddenly, in such a glow of strange delight that her eyes were full of other brightness than the shining of her pleasure.
“Fairy stories do happen!” she said. “You have made one! It was a fairy story yesterday—but now—oh! just think how like a fairy king you are, and what you are giving to us! It will be enough to make stories of forever!”
He laughed again. She found out in time that he often laughed that short half-laugh when he was moved by something. He had had a rough sort of life, successful as it had been, and it was not easy for him to express all he felt.
“That’s all right,” he said, “that’s just as it should be. But you are giving something to me, too—you three.”
And so they were, and it was not a little thing.
Their afternoon was a thing of which they could never have dreamed and for which they could never have hoped. Before it was half over they began to feel that not only John Holt was a prince, but that by some magic metamorphosis they had become princes themselves. It seemed that nothing in that City Beautiful was to be closed to them. It was John Holt’s habit to do things in a thorough, business-like way, and he did this thing in a manner which was a credit to his wit and good sense.