She settled everything in that way; she counted the petals of fennel daisies and blew thistle from dandelions.
“If they’s one cloud in the sky, we’ll put on the rose-pink one,” said Mary Elizabeth. “And if there isn’t any, that’ll mean blue.”
She settled everything that way—she counted the petals of fennel daisies, blew the thistle from dandelions, did one thing if she could find twelve acorns and another if they were lacking. Even then Mary Elizabeth seemed always to be watching for a guiding hand, to be listening for a voice to tell her what to do, and trying to find these in things of Nature.
We dressed the Eleven in their best frocks, weighing each choice long, and seated them about a table made of a box covered with a towel. We sliced a doughnut and with it filled two small baskets for each end of the table, on which rested my toy castor and such of my dishes as had survived the necessity which I had felt for going to bed with the full set, on the night of the day, some years before, when I had acquired them. We picked all the flowers suitable for doll decorations—clover, sorrel, candytuft, sweet alyssum. We observed the unities by retiring for a time sufficient to occupy the tea-party in disposing of the feast; and then we came back and sat down and stared at them. Irene Helena, I remember, had slipped under the table in a heap, a proceeding which always irritated me, as nakedly uncovering the real depths of our pretence—and I jerked her up and set her down, like some maternal Nemesis.
In that moment a wild, I may almost say thick, shriek sounded through our block, and there came that stimulating thud-thud of feet on earth that accompanies all the best diversions, and also there came the cracking of things,—whips, or pistols, or even a punch, which rapidly operated will do almost as well. And down the yards of the block and over the fences and over the roof of my play-house came tumbling and shrieking the New Boy, and in his wake were ten of his kind.
Usually they raced by with a look in their eyes which we knew well, though we never could distinguish whether it meant robbers or pirates or dragons or the enemy. Usually they did not even see us. But that day something in our elaborate preparation to receive somebody or to welcome something, and our eternal moment of suspended animation at which they found us, must have caught the fancy of the New Boy.
“Halt!” he roared with the force and effect of a steam whistle, and in a moment they were all stamping and breathing about Mary Elizabeth and me.
We sprang up in instant alarm and the vague, pathetic, immemorial impulse to defence. We need not have feared. The game was still going forward and we were merely pawns.