This necessitated the removing of her from the table and a good deal of cleansing and re-dressing on the part of Bidelia, the hired girl.
She had movable eyes; they were very lovely, but, if you’ll believe it, she’d screw them round, just to be contrary, so that she’d look cross-eyed for hours together. No sweet persuasion or threat of punishment could induce her to look like a doll in her right mind.
This was not quite so bad though, as the outlandish noises she made when she didn’t want to say “mamma,” which she could do very distinctly when she first arrived, at Christmas.
But a crisis in her petulant obstinacy came, when she wouldn’t sit still to have her hair combed, and it looked like a “hurrah’s nest,” her brother Bob said. All her naughtiness came right out then. She rolled one eye entirely up in her head, and left it there, and stared so wild with the other, that Sirena gave her a pretty lively shake, but she only dropped that eye and rolled up the other.
This made her little mamma pause and meditate. She got provoked as she looked at her, and then she gave her a double shake; then that bad doll rolled up both her eyes, and nothing could induce her to get them down again.
Oh, dear! How many dreadful things she looked like. There was a vicious parrot in the park that made its eyes look just like Adalina’s did, just before it stuck its head through the bars of its cage to bite people. And there was a stone lady, that was named “Ceres,” on one of the paths in the same park, and she kept her eyes rolled up all the time, greatly to the terror of Sirena and Bidelia, who had to pass her in coming home in the twilight. And down street there was a tobacconist’s sign that represented a fairy queen, with butterfly wings, taking a pinch of snuff, and the weather had taken all the paint off her eyes and she looked simply hideous; and Sirena grasped Bidelia very tight, till they got round the corner. Now here was her lovely French doll looking like them and cutting up worse. She’d go to mamma with this trouble as she did with all others.
She put her doll down with her face against the carpet, and taking hold of her pink kid arm, dragged her, not very gently, over the carpet to her mother.
At that moment in bounced Rob, who, immediately taking in the situation of affairs, exclaimed,—“Oh, don’t be so cruel to Adalina! Is she just horrid? You know, Rena, that’s what you are, sometimes, yourself. What’s the matter any way? What makes you look so glum?”
“This doll is acting dreadful; just look at her eyes!” said Sirena.
“You can’t tell any thing by any one’s eyes, yours look like the 4th of July, now, and you’re a delightful little girl, everybody says; you don’t whack things round, and scream, when the flowers bloom in the spring.”