Dorothy suspecting delights from which she was to be excluded, was inclined to make slow work of undressing, and relieved the tedium of the process by frantic demonstrations of affection. “Wish you’d go to bed with me, Aunt Peggy. ’Cause I love you so awfully.”
“Oh, this isn’t bedtime for big girls. They won’t be sleepy for a long while yet.”
“I won’t be sleepy for a long while, either. Won’t you sit beside my bed, Aunt Peggy, ’cause I’m ’fraid. If a bear should come–”
“Oh, Dorothy, don’t think so much about bears. Think about the little angels that watch good children when they are asleep.”
Dorothy fell into a fit of musing. “I wish those little angels would play with me when I was awake, ’stead of watching me when I was asleep. Say, Aunt Peggy, which would you rather have, wings or roller-skates?”
Peggy steered the conversation away from this delicate question to Dorothy’s prayers, which Dorothy galloped through with cheerful irreverence. On the “Amen” her eyes flashed open.
“Now, Aunt Peggy, you’ve got to tack down my eyelids, same as my mamma does.”
“Why, of course.” Peggy patiently kissed the long-lashed lids shut, stimulated by Dorothy’s cheerfully impersonal comments on her performance, and even drove a few extra “tacks,” in quite unnecessary spots, as, for example, the corners of Dorothy’s roguish mouth, and the dimple showing in the curve of her pink cheek. And by that time even Dorothy could think of no further excuses for detaining her.
Down-stairs the preliminary steps to the realization of the romance of a real wood fire on a real hearth had proved prosaic enough. In the beginning the fire had frankly sulked, and instead of blazing up brightly, had emitted clouds of smoke out of all proportion to its size. Every one was coughing as Peggy came into the room, and handkerchiefs were busy wiping tears from brimming eyes, so that outwardly the scene was anything but joyous. But the draught from the open windows finally stimulated the lazy chimney to greater exertions, and just as Peggy crossed the threshold, a brave little flame leaped up from the smoking, smouldering mass, and a cheery crackle made music plainly audible above the chorus of coughing.
“Lovely!” cried Peggy, and warmed her hands at the blaze as if it had been midwinter. “As long as I didn’t have any of the trouble of making the fire, I’ll brush up the shavings and things.”