The waffles were so tiny and delicious that, every time she had swallowed one, Sara almost thought she had dreamed it.
"I didn't know you could cook, Avrillia," she said, shyly and admiringly.
Avrillia looked pleased. "Oh, anybody can cook!" she said, lightly. Sara understood from her tone that not everybody could write poems on rose-leaves.
"We do this every year, Sara," said Pirlaps, "the first time it snows. It's our favorite philanthropy. It's a big undertaking, and rather too much of a strain for Avrillia, but we can't make up our minds to give it up."
"And then, when it's all over," continued Avrillia, "I make waffles (aren't they good, Sara?) and we eat down here in the kitchen, and relax, and have a lovely, cozy time. And it makes it doubly pleasant when we have some congenial person to help us celebrate—like you, Sara."
Sara's little heart swelled with love and pride. Her eyes traveled once more over the shining little table, and the friendly faces of Pirlaps and Avrillia, and the glowing little kitchen, and out through the little window, where the fog-bushes were making long blue shadows, and the fairy lights danced on the silver snow.
Never before had she stayed so late. But neither had she ever had such a lovely time.
Chapter VI The Little Lost Laugh
Sara had always intended to take her dolls with her to the Garden, but every morning before the sixth morning she forgot it. On the sixth morning, however, her arms were so full of dolls that she could not take off her dimples. She had not foreseen that difficulty.
She had not really intended to bring them all. But the Brown Teddy-Bear looked so fiercely sad that she decided at the very outset that she could not leave him. He was not really a doll, of course, but as Sara kept him dressed in a kerchief and full skirt, he had the effect of a doll—a sort of Wolf-Grandmother-of-Red-Ridinghood doll. And the Billiken looked so cheerful that Sara decided that she must surely take him along, to reward him for being so unfailingly pleasant. And the Japanese doll had to go, because he was the newest, and because he was the only one who was large enough to wear the pink tulle lady-doll's hat Sara's aunt had sent her on her birthday. His head was as bare as an egg, because the little rosette of black hair that distinguishes a Japanese doll had come unglued. This made the effect of the hat a little odd; still, he could wear it. The Kewpie was just too cunning to leave—that was all there was to that; and no right-minded mother ever left the baby. So that made it necessary to take the Baby doll with the long clothes. (That is, she should have been wearing long clothes, but Sara's dolls never wore the clothes that belonged to them; and this morning the Baby was tastefully attired in a wide red sash, with the Japanese doll's paper parasol stuck through it, like the dagger in a comic opera.)