“Dorothy! Dorothy!”
A tremor ran through the child—she seemed to struggle with herself. From her cataract of curls came a sound as of torn canvas, a sound dangerously like one of those explosions of snicker that Dorothy frequently emitted in church during the long prayer. But she did not look up.
Half angry, half ecstatic, Mrs. Vickery rose and moved among the littered corpses, like Edith looking for King Harold’s body on Hastings field. She passed by her nephew, Tommy Jerrems, and Mrs. Burbage’s boy, Clyde, and proceeded to the eerie stranger on the panther-skin.
This child would have looked deader if she had not been breathing so hard, and if her exquisite face had not been so scarlet in the tangle of her hair, which was curiously adorned with bottle-straw and excelsior from a packing-case in the cellar and with artificial flowers from a last-summer’s hat of Mrs. Vickery’s in the attic.
Mrs. Vickery bent above the panting ruins, lifted one relaxed hand, and inquired, “And who are you, little girl?”
“Don’t touch me, please; I’m all wet!”
Mrs. Vickery forgot her imagination long enough to expostulate, “Why, no, you’re not, my dear!”
And now the eyes opened with the answer: “Oh yes, I am, if you please. I’ve just drownded myself in the pool here—if you please.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Vickery assented. “Well, hadn’t you better get up before you catch cold?”
The answer to this question was another—a poser.