“Your papa is a very sensible man, little queen of the fairies,” returned the make-believe Lady Washington; and she stooped to bend in shape the wire taste in Weezy’s drooping left wing.
“Now I’m going to see if I can tell Kirke and Mollie in their play clothes,” said her dainty majesty, with a touch of her wand on General Washington’s shoulder.
The general smiled upon her as she flitted away like a roseate cloud.
Through her pink silk mask, she observed many wonders in the street outside, and presently, she danced back to her mother, crying,—
“Look, look, mamma! There are Pauline and Mollie! White dresses on; sunbonnets too.”
The masked faces beneath the white sunbonnets turned in the direction of Weezy’s voice, but the white figures moved forward without halting.
“They’re just a-funning, mamma. It was Pauline and Molly, now truly.”
“It seems to me that the taller one is too tall for my Pauline, and the shorter one is too short for your Molly, señora,” said General George Washington Bradstreet, following with his eye the simply arrayed couple.
Turning neither to the right nor to the left, they walked on, arm-in-arm, under the brilliant arc light, while the fairy queen’s mamma smiled behind her black mask. Of all in the sun parlor, she and Lady Washington alone knew how Pauline and Molly were to be dressed.
Weezy grew impatient.