CHAPTER V

The crescent of the Drive, never without its pageant; the broad river
thronged with craft; the high forest-fringed precipice and the houses
that could be glimpsed beyond--all these played their part in
Gwendolyn's pretend-games. She crowded the Drive with the soldiers of
the General, rank upon rank of marching men whom he reviewed with pride,
while his great bronze steed pranced tirelessly; and she, a swordless
Joan of Arc in a three-cornered hat and smartly-tailored habit, pranced
close beside to share all honors from the wide back of her own
mettlesome war-horse.

As for the river vessels, she took long pretend-journeys upon
them--every detail of which she carefully carried out. The companions
selected were those smiling friends that appeared at neighboring
windows; or she chose hearty, happy laundresses from the roofs; adding,
by way of variety, some small, bashful acquaintances made at the
dancing-school of Monsieur Tellegen.

But more often, imagining herself a Princess, and the nursery a
prison-tower from the loop-holes of which she viewed the great, free
world, she liked to people the boats out of stories that Potter had told
her on rare, but happy, occasions. A prosaic down-traveling steamer
became the wonderful ship of Ulysses, his seamen bound to smokestacks
and railing, his prow pointed for the ocean whereinto the River crammed
its deep flood. A smaller boat, smoking its way up-stream, changed into
the fabled bark of a man by the name of Jason, and at the bow of this
Argo sat Johnnie Blake, fish-pole over the side, feet dangling, line
trailing, and a silvery trout spinning at the hook. A third boat,
smaller still, and driven forward by oars, bore a sad, level-lying,
white-clad figure--Elaine, dead through the plotting of cruel servants,
and now rowed by the hoary dumb toward a peaceful mooring at the foot of
some far timbered slope.

In each of the houses across the wide river, she often established a
pretend-home. Her father was with her always; her mother, too,--in a
silken gown, with a jeweled chaplet on her head. But her household was
always blissfully free of those whose chief design it was to thwart and
terrify her--Miss Royle, Jane, Thomas; her teachers [as a body]; also,
Policemen, Doctors and Bears. Old Potter was, of course, the
pretend-butler. And Rosa, notwithstanding the fact that she had once
been, while at Johnnie Blake's, the herald of a hated bed-time went as
maid.

Gw