“Oh, very!”
“Then she’s not,” said the wooden man, with conviction. “I have never seen Amy Lowell, but Mr. Bitter Wynner, who was here one day last week, told me that he had got up in a street car and offered to be one of three men to give Miss Lowell a seat.”
“Dear me!” exclaimed Alice. “She needs some of my cake.”
“Cake?” asked the wooden man.
But Alice, fearing she had betrayed herself, would say no more about it.
“Well,” said the wooden man, “we’ve checked on the doll, and the bird, and the books. There was to be a kitten, I believe. That means that we’ll have to go back to the menagerie.”
“I won’t go back to the menagerie,” Alice said firmly, “and if the kittens are no more polite than the donkeys, I won’t have one.”
“You’ll have to ask Santa Claus to strike it off the list then, or you’ll have it sure tomorrow morning. And we’ll have to hustle, too, for the old boy closes up at eight o’clock. He went on strike for a shorter day, last month—seven hundred of him—and after eight o’clock he won’t do a lick of work.”
“Let’s hurry,” cried Alice, breathlessly.
So they hurried back through the teeming aisles, past the Plausible Donkey, who brayed after them jeeringly, past the Singing Bird, which offered to finish its song if they would only tarry, past the stuck-up Queen of the Dolls, who ogled the Wooden Man, shamefully, and at length arrived at the cottony dwelling of Santa Claus. But—alas!—the door now was closed, and tacked to the outer panel was a large sign, “Gone to the Races. Back Next Year.”