"I can't pretend, Elizabeth: they needn't ask me to pretend."
Elizabeth began to dance toward him with fairy beautiful mockery:—
"You just pretended you were dead on the battle-field, among your soldiers: you just pretended the moon was shining. You just pretended Elsie had on a red woollen helmet. You just pretended you were fighting William the Conqueror. Oh, no! It is impossible for you to pretend, you poor deficient child!"
"That's different, Elizabeth. That's not pretending; that's imagining. You knew it wasn't true: there wasn't any secret about it: it didn't fool anybody. But this pretending about Christmas and about how things get on the Tree, and that idiotic old buffoon!—that's trying to make us believe it is true when it is not true; and that it is real when it is not real! That's the way fathers and mothers raise their little immigrants!"
Elizabeth danced before him more wildly, watching him with love and beautiful laughter: "So when papa says he is Santa Claus, he is pretending! And when you say you are King Harold, you're imagining! Why, what a bright child you are! How did you ever get to be a member of this dull family?"
"I didn't expect you to understand the difference, because you girls are used to doing both—you girls! How could you know the difference between imagining and pretending—you girls! When you are always doing both—you girls!"
"Why, what superior creatures we must be, to do so much more than boys," sang Elizabeth. Her head was filled with fragments of nursery ditties; and the occasion seemed to warrant the production of one. With her eyes resting on him, she made a little dance in his honor and at his expense; and she cadenced her footfalls to the rhythm of her words:—
The innocent lambs!—
They have no shams,
And they've nothing but wool to hide them.
They cannot pretend
Because at one end
They've nothing but tails to guide them.
She suddenly glided forward step by step, airy sylph of unearthly joy, and threw her arms around his neck and covered his face with kisses, and then darted away from him again, dancing. With his arms folded he looked at her as a stone mile-post might have looked at a ruby-throated humming-bird.
"You promised," he said—"you promised that we'd find the key, and that all four of us would walk in on them to-night. But what do you know about keeping promises—you girls!"