"Yes, I can. I'd like to know why you can't make believe the whole thing just as well as part of it. I'm as much like a man as you're like Mary Queen of Scots, or Jack is like Sir Whatever-his-name."
"Oh, but——" began Margery, with the anxious line appearing between her eyes that always came there when she was worried.
"Now I think that it would be a bother to take any of these characters," said Amy, the peacemaker. "You know, all the letters would have to fit the parts, or they'd be silly, and I never could keep up writing thee and thou, and wot ye, instead of do you know, and all that kind of words. You'd have to write the way Shakespeare did, and I can't."
"Can't you? That's queer," remarked Margery, and the rest shouted.
"No, I can't," Amy continued, quite unconscious of a joke. "I'd like to be the good Lady Godiva myself, who saved her people from starving, but I couldn't keep it up."
"Couldn't you?" asked the others, and laughed again.
"No, I couldn't," reiterated Amy, who was the practical little woman of the party. "I say we just take names, and not characters."
"Well," assented Margery reluctantly, "I'll be the Lady Griselda of the Castle of the Lonely Lake."
"My goodness, Margery; no wonder you write poetry!" exclaimed Beatrice.
"I'll be——" but she got no farther.