ssy looked up. Her cheeks were flaming with excitement, for any
bit of print, however crude, had the power to move her as reality could
not. At eleven she shivered and glowed over pseudo-sentiment, while a
tragedy in the mine--whose tall chimneys she could see from her
window--was as intangibly distant and irrelevant as weekly statistics of
the superintendent's mining reports.

Her juniors harkened respectfully; but neither would permit the other to
ask the question, for fear of its revealing the nature of the answer
hoped for. So they withdrew for a period, returning with the following
query, which Bep allowed Fom to put, so sure was she of the response:

"Did or did not Mrs. Clair ever have a dress before she married Mr.
Clair?"

To this the oracle gave answer:

She did not, for how could she, she being Mr. Clair's second wife; his
first, an accomplished lady, but all-solid china, having fallen from
the top story of the apartment-house and smashed herself into bits, and
the widower having himself accompanied Sissy and Split to the shop to
select her successor, whose first gown was, of course, a heavy mourning
robe.

Bep heaved a deep sigh of content. She ran back to the woodshed so
relieved that, although she had won a valuable shut-up, she did not care
to "trophy" in her victory. Fom followed. But her grief for Mrs. Clair
was bitterer even than her own disappointment.

"I want the Smith twins," she said stiffly, when they got back to the
dolls' sky-scraper. And Bep understood.

The Smith twins were an invention of technical Fom's that had become an
institution with herself and her playmate. Two tiny china dolls dressed
in baby long clothes (the better to hide the fact that they were
legless), the one with pink, the other with a blue sash, were brought up
from the lowest story, where broken-nosed Mrs. Smith lived with her
family of cripples.

They were dolls of bad omen, these two, but following instead of
prophesying a storm. When it became absolutely necessary for one Madigan
twin to be "mad" at the other, and yet that the business of playing be
uninterrupted, the Smith twins invariably made their appearance. They
were supposed to save one's dignity; in reality, they lent piquancy to
games and rendered "making up" delightful.

Occasionally Bep and Fom did disown each other and adopt a chum from the
outside world. One Beulah, known as "Bombey," Forrest was always ready
obligingly to serve either or both of