"Don't eat it!" shouted Sunny Boy "at the top of his lungs" Harriet would have said. "Don't bite it! Throw it away! The witch poisoned it!"
He stood up on the seat, waving his hands frantically, a conspicuous little figure in a blue and white sailor suit.
How the people about him laughed! The lady sitting next to him had to wipe her eyes because she laughed so hard the tears came. Mother pulled Sunny Boy down into the seat beside her, and Snow White went on eating her apple, because, of course, the play had to go on.
"It's only make-believe, dear," whispered Mother, smoothing Sunny Boy's tousled hair. "You know she won't really die."
Sunny Boy smiled, a faint little smile.
"I guess I forgot it wasn't real," he said sheepishly. "Anyway, the little girl from Georgia is crying. I guess she forgot, too."
The little girl from Georgia was crying, the big tears rolling slowly and silently down her cheeks. Many of the children all over the house were crying, or if not actually crying, sniffling a bit. Snow White had eaten her apple and fallen asleep and the poor little brown dwarfs came home to find her, as they supposed, dead.
But the third and last act had a happy ending. Snow White came to life again, and the big curtain came down and the lights flared up to show a houseful of happy, smiling children being buttoned into coats and gloves, and having their caps and hats and bonnets put on for them by mothers and grandmothers and aunts and big sisters.
Sunny Boy walked soberly up the aisle beside his mother, thinking about a great many things. He thought about the dwarfs, and how he would like to know some to play with. He thought about the big theater, and wondered if it was fun to be an actor. And then he thought what a lot of children had come to see the play, and whether they all lived in New York. He put this last thought into words.
"Do they all live here?" he asked Mother, who, of course, did not know what he had been thinking and had to have it explained to her.