“Do you know, Johnny,” said Tiny, a few days after Johnny had met Jim, and heard about Taffy, “I don’t believe you mean to—but you are growing rather cross. Perhaps you don’t feel very well?”
Johnny burst out laughing; Tiny’s manner, as she said this, was so very funny. It was what her brother called her “school-marm air.”
“That’s much better!” said Tiny, nodding her head with a satisfied look, “I was ’most afraid you’d forget how to laugh, it’s so easy to forget things.”
“Now Tiny!” said Johnny, with the fretful sound in his voice which had struck her as a sign that he didn’t feel well, “you say a thing like that, and you think you’re smart, but it isn’t easy to forget things at all, some things, I mean. I do believe folks forget all they want to remember, and remember all they want to forget!”
“I don’t know of anything I want to forget,” remarked Tiny, “and I should not think you would either. Is it a bad dream?”
“No,” replied Johnny, “I don’t suppose it is, though sometimes it kind of seems to me as if it might be, and I’m a little in hopes I’ll wake up and find it is, after all!”
“But I do not wish to forget my bad dreams,” said Tiny, “for after they’re over, they are very interesting to remember, like that one about walking on the ceiling, you know, like a fly. It was dreadful, while it lasted, but it pleases me to think of it now. Aren’t you going to tell me what it is that you ’most hope is a dream?”
“I don’t know,” said Johnny, doubtfully, “you are a very nice little girl, Tiny, for a girl, but you can’t be expected to know about things that happen to boys. Though to be sure, this sort of thing might happen to girls, I suppose, if they went to school. You know that new boy I told you about?”
Tiny nodded.