“I saw ever so many in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and then my father has some in his camp in the Adirondacks.”
“Has he many?”
“A dozen.”
“I’m just wild to see one. Are they as beautiful as that picture in the fairy-tale?”
“They’re as beautiful as—as—” Maida groped about in her mind to find something to compare them to “—as angels,” she said at last.
“And do they really open their tails like a fan?”
“That is the most wonderful sight, Dicky, that you ever saw.” Maida’s manner was almost solemn. “When they unfurl the whole fan and the sun shines on all the green and blue eyes and on all the little gold feathers, it’s so beautiful. Well, it makes you ache. I cried the first time I saw one. And when their fans are down, they carry them so daintily, straight out, not a single feather trailing on the ground. There are two white peacocks on the Adirondacks place.”
“White peacocks! I never heard of white ones.”
“They’re not common.”
“Think of seeing a dozen peacocks every day!” Dicky exclaimed. “Jiminy crickets! Why, Maida, your life must have been just like a fairy-tale when you lived there.”