Peter guessed what was happening: “No, of course it isn’t,” quickly. And to divert him, contributed to the Room a sailing-boat, a rustic sailing-boat, stationary, and overgrown with ivy and clematis. And from the stern should depend a tiny toy sailing-boat, price sixpence halfpenny, which they could really sail on a piece of string. “And we’ll name it the ‘Strike-me-pink,’” cried Peter fiercely.
“And paint it green,” added Stuart, feeling better. And then, in opposition, he offered a nautical summer-house, with decks, and ropes, and a burgee fluttering bravely from the mainmast.
The Room might by now be considered almost complete in its furnishings. With a Heaven-born inspiration, Merle placed in its exact centre a small bamboo table, rather rickety, on which reposed a vase of flowers.
“Don’t you think,” Peter demanded doubtfully, “that it looks a wee bit out of place among all those castles and animals and things?”
“Not at all;” Merle was inclined to be huffy. “Merely the feminine touch about the home;” and she considered the possibility of draping Euston with an antimacassar.
... Bit by bit, as the red ball of the sun quenched its fires in the chill Atlantic, so the dingy little number nine bedroom of the Ocean Hotel, grew darker and darker still. At last nothing could be descried save the grey outlines of the tin basin; a glimmer across the cracked looking-glass; on and around the bed, three figures, dimly sprawling.
But in their own Playroom, the trio disport themselves as lords and emperors. Boundless space is theirs; time without limit; while facts they prick and shrivel like toy-balloons.
Peter, astride of the engine which draws her wagon-lit, is whizzing round and round the Outer Circle, all the signals in her favour, that naught shall arrest her triumphant speed.
Merle, discovering that Stuart has, after all, succeeded in importing his private public-house, enters through its swing-doors, nothing loth to demand a strawberry-ice-cream soda. The while Stuart dangles his legs from the notched parapet of his castle; and noting Squeith in the act of hailing the bell-buoy who sells the morning muffins, impishly frustrates all such traffic by a sudden alteration of the time to half-past five p.m.
“Tea is on the table,” he chants, a super-leprechaun; “and Squeith has missed the muffin-man again! Poor Squeith! for him always the muffin that is stale; for him it is always yesterday.”