“Gee!” exclaimed Tommy, looking first at the stick in his hand and then at the stick in the mirror. After a little while he said, “Gee!” again. It was all he could say.
Mary couldn’t say anything but Muffs found herself talking all at once as if she would never stop.
“It’s a magic wand!” she cried. “We’ve really turned into story book people. We’re not real and the rabbit wasn’t real and I don’t b’lieve even the house is real. But we can make things real again with the wand. Touch something else, Tommy, and see what happens.”
“Aw, you touch something,” he said, handing her the stick as if he were glad to get rid of it.
“What shall I touch?” she asked, circling around the room. Nothing in it seemed very solid and she had never outgrown her fear of breaking things.
“Try this,” suggested Mary, pointing to a large vase of flowers that stood on an equally large stand. “Maybe you can change them into gold the way King Midas did in the story.”
“I’d love golden roses,” Muffs said softly. She had a feeling that she was acting on a stage and that those three reflections were really watching her. Even the floor felt wabbly. It was more like a stage than ever when she played fairy princess and reached out with her wand to touch the roses.
Then she forgot to act! It wasn’t a bit like a play any more because something perfectly dreadful had happened. Muffs had broken the vase! She hadn’t meant to break it. She had only tapped it ever so gently but the moment the wand touched it the whole bottom fell out. It left a great hole that went right on through the stand and looked deep enough to go through the floor too, through the floor and through the earth until it came to China on the other side. Flowers, soil, everything was swallowed up in this enormous hole. Muffs wanted to crawl into the hole too and hide forever so that nobody would ever know the awful thing she had done.
“You’ve broken it,” Mary was scolding her. Two Marys were scolding her, the real Mary and the Mary in the looking-glass. Two Tommys stood there big-eyed, staring at what was left of two Guides with leafy fingers.
“I guess he wasn’t the Bramble Bush Man,” Tommy’s voice said sorrowfully. “Let’s beat it before the real Bramble Bush Man comes home.”