Again she changed the things that lay beside the white cloth and the glass. When Jimsi looked, she saw that now there was out-door scenery: bushes, trees, a fence. Why, it might have been a street in a little town!
“I’ll show you something else!”
This time, the “something” was an automobile.
As Joyce held the frame in the clear sunlight, its shadow on the screen was plain. As Jimsi watched, the automobile rushed rapidly across the screen from one end of the frame to the other! Oh, what fun! And the shadow people in it seemed evidently out for a joy ride. One wondered that the automobile didn’t spill them out till Joyce turned the frame around and showed Jimsi that the automobile was cut out of heavy paper and that it and the people were all one piece!
“I’d like to see one of your motion picture plays,” declared Jimsi. “Can’t you start one and make it go right through from beginning to end?”
“If it were only dark, I could,” said the little lame girl. “But you see Mother needs the light for her sewing just now. So we can’t draw the curtains. I’ll show you my scenery instead. Some other time we’ll make the whole motion picture play— Wouldn’t it be fun for the paper dolls, when I have made mine! Your paper dolls and mine can go to see the pictures: we’ll have a big time! Maybe, we can make up a new play and I can show you how to cut the scenery for it—shall I?”
“What plays have you made?”
“Well,” said the little lame girl, “you know I read a great deal. I make the plays of the stories that I read. I made Alice in Wonderland for one. I traced the pictures from the illustrations in my book and cut them out of heavy wall paper. (One can use cardboard for furniture and scenery and actors, only it’s more expensive, you know.) I traced most of my actors but not all. Some I had to draw—I’m not very good at drawing because I never had lessons. Mother says, she thinks I could draw if I did have lessons but I just do the best I can without.”
“I think,” Jimsi insisted, “I think that you must know how to draw pretty well to cut out outlines of people from paper.”
“Oh, no,” contradicted Joyce. “Sometimes I can’t think the way things ought to look. Then I go through some pictures in a book and when I find an outline that will be good to use, I copy it. Or else, sometimes, I just double a piece of thin paper and cut out the way little children do to make paper dolls when they make both sides exactly alike. Mother used to make dolls in strings that way when I was small.”