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Updated: August 2, 2024
Exactly how to deal with this situation she did not know, and it was really in order to discuss her peculiar case that she had visited Mrs. Makebelieve. She could, of course, have approached the young man and demanded from him an increase of money that would still be equitable to both parties, but she confessed a repugnance to this course.
Sometimes he saw nothing in the world but the pavement, and at other times he saw everything. He looked at Mary Makebelieve once and she got a fright; she had a queer idea that she had known him well hundreds of years before and that he remembered her also.
He saw an English-man stalking hideously forward with a princess tucked under each arm, while their brothers and their knights were netted in enchantment and slept heedless of the wrongs done to their ladies and of the defacement of their shields.... "Alas, alas and alas, for the once-proud people of Banba!" Mrs. Makebelieve was astonished when the policeman knocked at her door.
He had no more to say, however, and he blundered and fumbled into silence. For a moment or two the little room was so still that the quietness seemed to hum and buzz like an eternity. Then, with a sigh, Mrs. Makebelieve spoke.
At this meal she used to arrange also to have the room re-papered and the chimney swept and the rat-holes stopped up there were three of these, one was on the left-hand side of the fire grate, the other two were under the bed, and Mary Makebelieve had lain awake many a night listening to the gnawing of teeth on the skirting and the scamper of little feet here and there on the floor.
The interval which followed his question weighed heavily upon them all. It was only broken by Mrs. Makebelieve, who began to hum a song as she polished the fire grate. She meant to show her careless detachment from the whole matter, but in the face of Mary's silence she could not keep it up. After a few moments she moved around and said: "Why don't you answer the gentleman, Mary?"
She used often to cry because she was not rich. Sometimes, when she came home from work, she liked to pretend that she was rich; she would play at imagining that some one had died and left her a great fortune, or that her brother Patrick had come back from America with vast wealth, and then she would tell Mary Makebelieve of the things she intended to buy and do the very next day.
Mary Makebelieve noticed that many people nudged each other as he went by, and then they would turn and look after him and go away whispering. These and many others she saw almost daily, and used to look for with a feeling of friendship.
It was "Fat Fireman," for he often played that he was a fireman; putting out makebelieve fires, and pretending he was a fire engine. Once or twice his father had taken him to see a real one, and this pleased Freddie very much. In the first book of this series, called "The Bobbsey Twins," I told you something of the fun the four children had in their home town.
Makebelieve, requesting her to call on a Mrs. O'Connor, who had a house off Harcourt Street. This, of course, meant a day's work it also meant a new client. Mrs. Makebelieve's clients were always new. She could not remain for any length of time in people's employment without being troubled by the fact that these folk had houses of their own and were actually employing her in a menial capacity.
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