"Who would you be, if you could choose? Let us all say!" cried Bell. "A new game! two minutes for reflection!" and she took out her watch with a business-like air.
"Oh!" cried Gertrude. "But there are so many!"
"Silence!" said Bell; and there was an instant of absolute stillness. Taking advantage of it, a chipmunk ran across the brown carpet, and pausing midway, sat up on his haunches and surveyed the new and singular mountain ranges that had risen on his horizon. One of the mountains stirred—whisk! he was gone.
"Time's up!" said Bell. "Margaret, I will begin with you. With all history to choose from, who will you be?"
"Oh! must I be first?" cried Margaret. "As Gertrude says, there are so many; and yet when you come to think them over, there is something against every one; I mean something one would not like to do or to suffer. But,—on the whole,—I think I would be Elizabeth of Hungary."
"Our Lady of the Roses? Well, she was lovely, though I should be sorry to marry her husband. The story would have been somewhat different if I had; but I am not a saint. Peggy, your turn!"
"This man we are reading about!" said Peggy, decidedly. "La Salle!"
"Toots!"
"Bell, you know I never can decide between Shakespeare and Raphael. I have to be both; they lived quite far enough apart for separate incarnations."
"Greedy, grasping girl!" said Bell. "Kitty, who are you?"