ratic as their potential millionaire mistresses. Humbler
sisters of middle class combined prettiness with cheapness, and had
the satisfaction of showing their own price marks.

These delicate creatures, lovely in pale-tinted robes or forlorn in
chemises, were the bright spots in the vast, dark department, shining
out through the dusk as stars shine through thin clouds. As Win became
one of the band of shadows, under Sadie's direction, gradually she
grew accustomed to the gloom, and her gaze called many of the strange
objects forth into life.

She found long-haired Shetland ponies big enough to ride, glorified
hobby horses clad in real skins, and unglorified ones with nostrils
like those of her landlady in Columbus Avenue. Biscuit-coloured Jersey
cows, which could be milked, gazed mildly into space with expensive
glass eyes. Noah's arks, big enough to be lived in if the animals
would move up, seemed to have been painted with Bakst colours.
Fearsome faces glared from behind the bars of menagerie cages. Donkeys
and Chinese mandarins nodded good-morning and forgot to stop. Dragon
broods of miniature motor cars nested in realistic garages.

Dramatic scenes from real plays were being enacted in dumb show on the
stages of theatres apparently decorated by Rothenstein. The Russian
ballet had stopped in the midst of "Le Spectre de la Rose." Suits of
armour, which Ursus called "pewter raincoats," glimmered in dark
spaces behind piled drums and under limply hanging flags or
aeroplanes ready to take flight. Almost everything was
mechanical--each article warranted to do what it pretended to do in
order to have its appeal for the modern child.

Win was a child of yesterday; yet the big girl has always the little
girl of the past asleep in her heart, ready to wake up on the
slightest encouragement, and she felt the thrill of Toyland. If when
she was small she could ever have dreamed of spending her days in a
place like this, she would have bartered her chance of heaven for
it--heaven as described in her father's sermons. It was another of
life's little ironies that her lot should be cast in a world of toys
when she was too old to prefer it to Paradise.

Sadie and Ursus had used up the little time they had in warning her
what she would have to expect in Toys.

"There are some punk fellers who'll try it on with you--pinch or
tickle you as you pass by, and say things not fit for a dandy guyl
like you to hear," the lion tamer had hu