Part 30 (2/2)
CHAPTER XIII
ARE MEN MADE ONLY FOR THIS?
In the afternoon the lovers made a triumphant pilgrimage to the place where they had first met. All the toys in the little shop stared at them--the clowns and the dancers in pink and yellow and the bisque babies and the gla.s.sy-eyed dogs and cats.
The white elephant was again in the window. ”He seemed so lonely,”
Emily explained, ”and with Christmas coming I couldn't feel comfortable to think of him away from it all.”
Jean showed Derry her midnight camels. ”I am going to do peac.o.c.ks next,” she told him. ”I am so proud.”
He bought all of the camels and a lot of other things. ”We'll take them to Margaret Morgan's kiddies tomorrow; I want you to meet her.”
Miss Emily found her lavish customer interesting, but demoralizing.
”Run away with him, Jean,” she said. ”I am not used to Croesuses. He won't leave anything to sell, and then what shall I say to the people who want to buy?”
”Shut up your shop and go to tea with us at Chevy Chase,” Derry suggested.
Emily smiled at him. ”It is good of you to ask me, but I can't. I am not in love, and I have my day's work to do. But I think if you would like to take Jean--”
”Alone?” eagerly. ”Do you think I might?”
”Why not?”
”I was almost afraid to suggest it.”
”I am not a dragon. And there will never be a day like this for you again.”
Jean broke in at that. ”Oh, Emily, they will be wonderfuller!”
”But not this day--”
Derry knew what she meant. ”How sweet you are.”
Miss Emily, flus.h.i.+ng, was a transformed Miss Emily. ”Well, old people are apt to forget, and I have not forgotten.”
”Darling, darling,” Jean chanted. ”I am going to paint dragons, and they shall all have lovely faces, and I shall call them the Not-Forgetting Dragons.”
It was all very superlative. Miss Emily tried to send them away, but they still lingered. Jean set the music boxes going to celebrate the occasion, then stopped them because the only tunes they played were German tunes.
Derry laughed at her, then came to silence before a box of tin soldiers. They were little French soldiers, flat on their backs, bright with paint--
”I wonder how they feel about it?” he asked Jean.
”About what?”
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