“It’s like the cloth in the store,” I observed, balancing on my stomach on the sill. “It’s heaps prettier before it’s made up into clothes.”
“How funny,” said Margaret Amelia. “I like the trimming on, and the pretty buttons.”
“Let’s play,” I said hurriedly; for I had seen in her eyes that look which always comes into eyes whose owners have just called an idea “funny.”
“Very well. But,” said Betty, frankly, “I’m awful sick of playing Pretend. You always want to play that. We played that last time anyhow. Let’s play Store. Let’s play,” she said, with sudden zest, “Furniture Store, outdoors.”
The whole lawn became the ground floor for our shop. Forthwith we arranged the aisles of chairs, stopping to sit in this one and that “to taste the difference.” To sit in the patent upholstered rocker, close to the flowering currant bush fragrant with spicy, yellow buds was like being somewhere else.
“This looks like the pictures of greenhouses,” said Margaret Amelia, dragging a willow chair to the Bridal Wreath at the fork in the brick walk. She idled there for a moment.
“Emily Broom says that when they moved she rode right through town on their velvet lounge on the dray,” she volunteered.
We pictured it mutely. Something like that had been a dream of mine. Now and then, I had walked backward on the street to watch a furniture wagon delivering a new chair that rocked idle and unoccupied in the box. I always marvelled at the unimaginativeness of the driver which kept him on the wagon seat.
“We’ve never moved,” I confessed regretfully.
“We did,” said Betty, “but they piled everything up so good there wasn’t anything left to sit on. I rode with the driver—but his seat wasn’t very high,” she added, less in the interest of truth than with a lingering resentment.