, silent children. The
animal toys looked more like natural history models than the comfortable,
sympathetic companions that one would wish, at a certain age, to take to
bed with one, and to smuggle into the bath-room. The mechanical toys
incessantly did things that no one could want a toy to do more than a
half a dozen times in its lifetime; it was a merciful reflection that in
any right-minded nursery the lifetime would certainly be short.

Prominent among the elegantly-dressed dolls that filled an entire section
of the window frontage was a large hobble-skirted lady in a confection of
peach-coloured velvet, elaborately set off with leopard skin accessories,
if one may use such a conveniently comprehensive word in describing an
intricate feminine toilette. She lacked nothing that is to be found in a
carefully detailed fashion-plate--in fact, she might be said to have
something more than the average fashion-plate female possesses; in place
of a vacant, expressionless stare she had character in her face. It must
be admitted that it was bad character, cold, hostile, inquisitorial, with
a sinister lowering of one eyebrow and a merciless hardness about the
corners of the mouth. One might have imagined histories about her by the
hour, histories in which unworthy ambition, the desire for money, and an
entire absence of all decent feeling would play a conspicuous part.

As a matter of fact, she was not without her judges and biographers, even
in this shop-window stage of her career. Emmeline, aged ten, and Bert,
aged seven, had halted on the way from their obscure back street to the
minnow-stocked water of St. James's Park, and were critically examining
the hobble-skirted doll, and dissecting her character in no very tolerant
spirit. There is probably a latent enmity between the necessarily under-
clad and the unnecessarily overdressed, but a little kindness and good
fellowship on the part of the latter will often change the sentiment to
admiring devotion; if the lady in peach-coloured velvet and leopard skin
had worn a pleasant expression in addition to her other elaborate
furnishings, Emmeline at least might have respected and even loved her.
As it was, she gave her a horrible reputation, based chiefly on a
secondhand knowledge of gilded depravity derived from the conversation of
those who were skilled in the art of novelette reading; Bert filled in a
few damaging details from his own limited imagination.

"She's a