They would get up, and they did so. We three just fitted the sill, with Harold looking wistfully upward.
“Go find a nice stick,” Margaret Amelia advised him maternally.
“What’ll we play?” I was pursuing politely. “Pretend?” I intimated. Because of course there is nothing that is quite so much fun as pretend. “Or real?” I conceded the alternative its second place.
“Pretend what?” Betty wanted to know.
“Well, what difference does that make?” I inquired scornfully. “We can decide that after.”
However, we duly weighed the respective merits of Lost-in-the-Woods, Cave-in-the Middle-of-the-World, and Invisible, a selection always involving ceremony.
“Harold can’t play any of them,” Margaret Amelia remembered regretfully. “He don’t stay lost nor invisible—he wriggles. And Cave scares him.”
We considered what to do with Harold, and at last mine was the inspiration—no doubt because I was on the home field. In a fence corner I had a play-house, roofed level with the fence top. From my sand-pile (sand boxes came later—mine was a corner of the garden sacred to me) we brought tin pails of earth which we emptied about the little boy, gradually covering his fat legs and nicely packing his plaid skirt. Then we got him a baking-powder can cover for a cutter and a handleless spoon, and we went away. He was infinitely content.
“Makin’ a meat pie,” he confided, as we left him.
Free, we were drawn irresistibly back to the out-of-doors furniture. We jumped in the middle of the mattresses lying in the grass, we hung the comforters and quilts in long overlapping rows on the clothes line and ran from one end to the other within that tent-like enclosure. Margaret Amelia arranged herself languidly on the Brussels couch that ordinarily stood in the upstairs hall piled with leather-bound reports, but now, scales falling from our eyes, we saw to be the bank of a stream whereon Maid Marian reclined; but while Betty and I were trying to decide which should be Robin Hood and which Alan-a-dale (alas, for our chivalry ... we were both holding out to be Robin) Maid Marian settled it by dancing down the stair carpet which made a hallway half across the lawn. We followed her. The terminus brought us back to the parlour window. We stepped on the coping and stared inside. This was our parlour! Yet it looked no more like the formal room which we seldom entered than a fairy looks like a mortal. Many and many a time an empty room is so much more a suggestive, haunted, beckoning place than ever it becomes after its furniture gets it into bondage. Rooms are often free, beautiful creatures before they are saddled and bridled with alien lives and with upholstery, and hitched for lumbering, permanent uses. I felt this vaguely even then.