"Blow in pepper!" said Lizzie. "Why should you do that?"
"To set 'em snee-ee-eezing, and make their eyes water; and then I'd mock 'em through the key-hole, just as they mock a person through a person's key-hole. No; no children for me. Give me grown-ups."
From all this the little dressmaker's new lodger could very well understand that the children of the street, who were strong and well, and could romp and play merrily all day, had not been as thoughtful and kind as they might have been to little Jenny Wren, whose life was so unlike and so much braver than theirs.
In a few days the two girls had become warm friends. Lizzie, who was eighteen years old, earned her living by working in a seamen's outfitter; that is, a shop where sailors' clothes are made. During the daytime Lizzie was away at her work, and Jenny sat at her little work-bench at home, except when she had to peg away on her little crutch to the milliners', or the doll shops, or to the house of some customer for whom she had dressed a doll. At night-fall, when her work was done, the dolls' dressmaker would lean back in her little low arm-chair, with her arms crossed, and sing in a sweet, thoughtful voice, and wait for Lizzie, who at about the same time would come out of her shop in Millbank, and hurry along in the sunset by the river-side until she came to Church Street, and the small house, and the small housekeeper who loved her so much.
"Well, Lizzie-Mizzie-Wizzie," Jenny would say, breaking off in her song, "what's the news out-of-doors?"
"SOMETIMES A VISITOR WOULD DROP IN."
"And what's the news in-doors?" Lizzie would answer, laying her gentle hand on the bright hair, which grew very long and thick and wavy on the head of the little dolls' dressmaker. Then they would have tea together, Lizzie spreading the cloth on the low work-bench, because Jenny could sit at that more easily than at the table, and while they ate they would talk over the day and its work. After supper, Lizzie would move Jenny, chair and all, so that she could look out over the square and into the evening sky, and then sit down beside her. Sometimes a visitor would drop in, perhaps one of Jenny's patrons who took an interest in her, or who had an order to give the little dressmaker.
"This is what I call the best time of the whole day," said Jenny one night, when they were sitting in the pleasant twilight; and then she continued, in a soft, low tone, "I wonder, Lizzie, how it happens that sometimes when I am working here, all alone, in the summer-time, I smell flowers. It isn't a flowery place, you know—it's anything but that. And yet as I sit at work I smell miles of flowers. I smell roses until I think I see them in great heaps—bushels of them around me on the floor—and I put down my hand and expect to make them rustle. I smell the white and the pink May in the hedges, and all sorts of flowers that I never was among, for I've seen very few flowers indeed in my life, my Lizzie-Mizzie-Wizzie."
"You must find it very pleasant, my dear Jenny."