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"I've had an ice-cream, and I'm going to have a new doll and a doll-carriage," said she. "Oh, Ellen!" She left her father and mother for a second and clung to Ellen, kissing her; then she was back. "Well, Andrew?" said Jim. He had a shamed face, yet there was something brave in it struggling for expression. "Well, Jim?" said Andrew. The two shook hands solemnly.
Near the door the messenger had set a little green Christmas tree, and grouped about it were a red sled, a doll-carriage, some toys, and a few parcels. If the blond doll in the little toy carriage toppled over, the messenger would set it up again; and when passing freight out he was careful not to knock a twig from the tree.
They would follow every move that Laura made as she played with the toys spread in profusion upon the grass. Laura often pretended not to see them. She would lift her large family of dolls, one after another, from cradle to bed and from bed to tiny chair and sofa. She would parade up and down the walk, using first one doll-carriage, then the other.
Pathetically poor little playthings were scattered about her: a doll fashioned from gingham and cotton-waste, makeshift dishes of pasteboard, a doll-carriage made from a broken flower-basket with spools for wheels. The man who entered saw all with one glance and understood that here in this bare room this child had been compelled to drag out the weary hours alone while the mother had toiled.
The new wheels were taken from the doll-carriage, all fragments were carefully sought out and all the discs were given to the apothecary who locked them into his safe. "The red-headed girl must be sacrificed after all," Toni thought. She planned and schemed, but she could think of no way by which the waitress could be saved from that destruction which hung over her.
Beside, maybe she was not such a dislikable girl as she had seemed at first. Dolly sat and regarded her. At last she said: "Then the doll-carriage belongs to your little sister." "To Genie, yes. How did you know she had one?" "Saw it come with your things, the day you moved in." "How old are you?" "Fourteen, but I'll be fifteen next month, June." "Why, so will I! Isn't that funny!
He hunted to find her belongings. He found a few clothes. There was no receptacle in which he could pack them. He folded them and crowded the articles in his pockets. He stuffed in the doll and the rude playthings and hooked the basket doll-carriage upon his arm. She did not waken when he picked her up.
She watched him closely, noting that his hand was unsteady, and that he was inclined to stagger after stooping for a little while. Finally, when the tree had been trimmed, and the sled for the boy and the doll-carriage for the girl were placed beneath it, she got him to lie down.
And as for the Misses Spanker, who daily drive in that superb open wagon with yellow wheels, and who resemble nothing so much as the figures in a Parisian doll-carriage, if they saw an admirer of theirs bargaining for peanut candy at a street stand they would not know him they would no more bow to a man so lost to all the finer sense of the comme il faut than they would nod to a street-sweeper.
"What would you like to play?" "We want to throw them." "No, don't do that. But I'll make you a new doll-carriage and these will be lovely wheels." The children assented and Amanda brought a pair of scissors in order to make holes in the little wheels. But they were too hard and the points of the blades slipped. "Ask father to use his small gimlet."
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