“But she’s wented out.”
“Well, I’ll hear them, then.”
“Dot to tell us fairy-’tory, too,” said the girl.
“All right, one fairy-’tory––”
She went to the nursery, and the cherubs swarmed up to her lap demanding “somefin bluggy.”
Invention failed her completely. She hunted through her memory among the Grimms’ fairy-tales. She could recall nothing that seemed sweet and guileless enough for these two lambs.
All that she could think of seemed to be made up of ghoulish 6 plots; of children being mistreated by harsh stepmothers; of their being turned over to peasants to slay; of their being changed into animals or birds; of their being seized by wolves, or by giants that drank blood and crunched children’s bones as if they were reed birds; of hags that cut them up into bits or thrust them into ovens and cooked them for gingerbread. It occurred to her that all the German fairy-stories were murderously cruel. She felt a revulsion against each of the legends. But her mind could not find substitutes.
After a period of that fearful ordeal when children tyrannize for romances that will not come, her mind grew mutinous and balked. She confessed her poverty of ideas.
The girl, Bettina, sulked; the boy screamed:
“Aw, botheration! We might as well say our prayers and go to bed.”