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Would she choose to give up the home where her living children had been born, at no matter what cost of horrid pain to herself, and were growing up to no matter what dark uncertainties in life, for this toy inhabited by paper-dolls? No, no, she had gone on, gone on, and left this behind.
Even at that early age she had a perception of the advantages of an atmosphere to art, and even to the affections. Without understanding it, she loved those obsolete paper-dolls and those women of former generations better because they gave her breathing-scope for her imagination.
In the middle was a large table, just splendid to work at when making paper-dolls' houses or anything like that; and round the room were shelves and cupboards to hold materials. "It just takes my breath away!" said Marjorie, as she sank down on the settee in the living-room; "I never saw anything like it! Can't we have just the best fun here all summer!" "I should say we could!" declared Molly.
"It won't take the rice as long as it does the potatoes, I am sure," said Nettie, "and the water will have to boil first." They returned to the paper-dolls, becoming quite interested in them till presently they heard a great sputtering, and running out found the water was boiling over. "I'll put on the rice now," said Nettie, "for I am getting hungry, aren't you?"
Polly he painted black to make her like the Queen of Sheba; he made Babes in the Woods of Beauty and Jane, and it rained on them all night; Isabella and Arabella I found on the clothes-line all broken to pieces, and he said they were only dancing on a tight rope; he sent Rose and Lily, the paper-dolls, you know, up in the air tied to the tail of his kite; the rag-baby he took for a scarecrow over his garden; and surely, Aunt Faith, you have not forgotten how he made Jeff Davis on the apple-tree, out of my dear china Josephine, or how he blew up Julia Rubber with his cannon last Fourth of July, when I lent her to him for the Goddess of Liberty?"
She had shown her talent in that way by the fatal caricature. "Somebody told me you could make mighty pretty paper-dolls," Edna went on, bound to make herself agreeable. "I do make them sometimes," replied Clara a little more graciously, "but I could never make any as pretty as this. I can copy things pretty well, but I can't make them up myself." For a moment Edna struggled with herself.
She would play house and paper-dolls and ring-games with the little children in the morning when the older ones were in school. She would play jackstones with the bigger girls in the afternoon. She would play running games with the crowd of girls and boys, of whom the W.M.N.T.’s were the leaders, towards night. Then sometimes she would grumble to Granny because the days were so short.
For our own part, we think the rich, tender, motherly nature of the Irish girl an element a thousand times more hopeful in our population than the faded, washed-out indifferentism of fashionable women, who have danced and flirted away all their womanly attributes, till there is neither warmth nor richness nor maternal fulness left in them, mere paper-dolls, without milk in their bosoms or blood in their veins.
Now it was Dicky hoisting himself along on his crutches, his face alight with his radiant smile. Now it was a line of laughing, rosy-cheeked children, as long as the tail of a kite, pelting to goal at the magic cry “Liberty poles are bending!” Or it was a group of little girls, setting out rows and rows of bright-colored paper-dolls among the shadows of one of the deep old doorways.
He had sympathized with her microscopic cut fingers, he had smiled into her glowing, damp little face when she stuttered to him long tales of bad doggies and big 'ticks; he had brought her "jacks" and paper-dolls and hair ribbons; he loved the diminutive femininity of the creature; she was all a woman, even at three.
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