“Five,” Mary Elizabeth persisted tranquilly, “and it’s not enough. We ought to have thirty.”
“Where you going to get your thirty?” demanded the exasperated Delia.
“Why,” said Mary Elizabeth, “that’s always easy!” And told us.
The king would sit at the head, with his prime minister and a lord or two. At the foot would be the queen with her principal ladies-in-waiting (at this end, so as to leave room for their trains). In between would be the fool, the discoverer of the new land, the people from the other planets, us, and the animals.
“‘The animals!’” burst out Delia. “Whoever heard of animals at the table?”
Oh, but it was the animals that the banquet was for. They were talking animals, and everyone was scrambling to entertain them, and every place in which they ate they changed their shapes and their skins.
“I never heard of such a game,” said Delia, outright, already sufficiently grown-up to regard this as a reason.
“Let’s not play it,” said Margaret Amelia Rodman, languidly, and, though Delia had the most emphasis among us, Margaret Amelia was our leader, and we abandoned the game. I cannot recall why Margaret Amelia was our leader, unless it was because she had so many hair-ribbons and, when we had pin fairs, always came with a whole paper, whereas the rest of us merely had some collected in a box, or else rows torn off. But I suppose that we must have selected her for some potentiality; or else it was that a talent for tyranny was hers, since this, like the habit of creeping on all fours and other survivals of prehistoric man, will often mark one of the early stages of individual growth.
This time Calista was peace-maker.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “We can do that before supper.”