Chapter 8 THE GREATEST TOY-SHOP ON EARTH

"No," said Betty, "I haven't found it, and now I'm almost sure I shan't, because Nita's lost hers."

"What has Nita lost?" asked Madeline from her nest of pillows. It was the evening after the play, and the Belden House felt justified in taking life easily. "She lost her head last night," chuckled Madeline, without waiting for Betty's answer. "Did you hear her imploring the organ-man in her most classic English not to let me take the monkey out in front to show to the President? As if I really would!"

"You've done just as crazy things in your time, dear," retorted Katherine Kittredge, who had come over to borrow one of Betty's notebooks and had found the atmosphere of elegant leisure that pervaded the room irresistible.

"Do you really think so?" asked Madeline amiably. "Well, before we go into that I want to know what else Nita has lost."

"Why, a pin," explained Betty,-"that lovely one with the amethyst in the centre and the ring of little pearls in a quaint old setting. It used to be her great-grandmother's. Mine wasn't much to lose, and I felt sure until to-day that it would turn up, but it hasn't, and now I'm afraid it was really stolen."

"Have you looked all through that?" asked Madeline, pointing to the miscellaneous assortment of books, papers, dance-cards and bric-a-brac that littered Betty's small desk to the point of positive inundation.

Betty assented with dignity. "And I haven't had time since to put it back in the pigeon-holes. When Nita told me about her pin, I got worried about mine-mother gave it to me and I couldn't bear to lose it for good-so I went through my desk and all my drawers and it was sweeping-day, so I asked Belden House Annie to look too. It's not here."

"Is Nita sure hers was stolen?" asked Katherine.

Betty nodded. "As sure as she can be without actually seeing it taken. She left it on her cushion yesterday when she came down to luncheon, and when she got back from physics lab, it was gone."

"What a shame!" said Madeline. "She ought to tell Mrs. Kent right away. I should strongly suspect the new table-girl."

"Oh, but she's a cousin of Belden House Annie's," explained Betty, "and I'm sure Annie would look after her. We all know that she's as honest as the day herself, and all the other maids have been here for years and years."

"It's queer," said Katherine, "if it was an outsider-a more or less professional thief, I mean-that he or she should come to this house twice, several weeks apart, and each time take so little. If it was a college girl now--"

"Oh, don't, Katherine," begged Betty. "I can't bear to think that any Harding girl would do such a thing. I'd ten times rather never know who it was than to find it was that way."

Just then the B's appeared airily attired in kimonos concealed under rain-coats, and laden with a huge pan of marshmallow fudge, which they had made, they explained, in honor of Roberta's successful début.

"What are you all looking so solemn about?" demanded Bob, when Babbie had gone in search of Roberta.

Betty told her, and Babe and Bob exchanged glances.

"It's not necessarily any one in this house who's responsible, I guess," said Babe. "Babbie's lost a valuable pin too, and Geraldine Burdett has lost a ring. Oh, about two weeks ago Gerry's was taken, and Babbie's before that. They've been keeping dark and trying to get up a clue, but they can't. They'll be all off when they hear about these other robberies."

"There was one awfully queer thing about Babbie's thief," put in Bob. "Her little gold-linked purse was on the chiffonier right beside her pin and it wasn't touched, though it was just stuffed with bills. That makes them afraid it was some girl who's awfully fond of jewelry and can't afford any."

"It isn't right to leave our lovely things around so, is it?" said Betty seriously. "It's just putting temptation in the way of poor girls."

"Exactly," agreed Madeline. "We go off for hours, never locking up anything, leaving our money and other valuables in plain sight, and if we do miss anything we can't be sure it's stolen and we don't have time to investigate for weeks after. It's a positive invitation to dishonesty."

"But it's such a nuisance to lock up," complained Babe, "and if I hide things I can't ever find them again, so I might as well not bother."

"I haven't any golden baubles," said Bob, "but I'm going to keep my money in 'Love's Labor Lost.' You'll find it there if you ever want to borrow."

"'Much Ado about Nothing' would be the most appropriate place for mine," laughed Katherine, "so I choose that. You probably won't find any if you want to borrow."

"But seriously, girls, let's all be more careful," advised Betty, "and let's ask other people to be. Think how perfectly awful it is to make chances for girls to forget themselves. But I shan't believe it's a Harding girl," she added decisively. "It would be perfectly easy for any dishonest young woman to go through the houses without being questioned. Perhaps she got frightened and didn't notice Babbie's money on that account or didn't have time to snatch up anything but the pin."

Just then Babbie appeared, bringing Roberta and Rachel Morrison who had met them in the hall, and in the general attack upon the fudge pan more serious issues were forgotten.

It was now the busiest, gayest part of the long fall term. Flying fast on the heels of the house play came Thanksgiving Day.

"And just to think of it!" wailed Bob. "Only two days vacation this year, and Miss Stuart and the president dropping the most awful hints about what will happen if you cut over. Nobody can go home. I hope the faculty will all eat too much and have horrible attacks of indigestion."

"Well, we may as well have as much fun as we can out of it," said Babbie philosophically. "I've written home for a spread; so we shan't die of hunger."

"Mrs. Kent says she's going to give us the best Thanksgiving dinner we ever ate," announced Betty cheerfully.

"I hope our matron will be seized with the same lofty ambition," said Katherine. "If she is, and if the skating holds, I shan't mind staying here."

"Weren't you going to stay anyway?" asked Helen Adams.

"Being a resident of the remote village of Kankakee, Illinois, and not having been urged to visit any of my Eastern friends, I was," admitted Katherine, solemnly, "but that doesn't make it any the nicer to have to work all day Saturday."

The skating did last, and the man at the rink, being taken in hand by the B's, sympathized heartily with their wrongs, and promised them a three days' ice carnival, which meant search-lights, bonfires and a big band on the ice every evening. There is nothing in the world more exhilarating than skating to good music. The rink was thronged with Harding girls and Winsted men, and the proprietor could not easily regard himself as a bona fide philanthropist.

The paper-chase, to get up an appetite on Thanksgiving morning, was Katherine Kittredge's idea and the basket-ball game in the afternoon between the Thanksgiving Dinners and the Training Tables was too fantastic to have originated with any one but Madeline Ayres.

Georgia Ames, dressed as a huge turkey gobbler, captained the Thanksgiving Dinners, who were gotten up as bunches of celery and mounds of cranberry jelly. The captain of the Training Table simulated a big bottle labeled "Pure Spring Water," and the members of her team were tastefully trimmed with slices of dry bread. Being somewhat less spectacular than their rivals, they were a little more agile and they won the game, which was so funny that it sent two of the faculty into hysterics.

"And that's almost as bad as indigestion," said Babe, who was a bunch of celery. At least she had been one until she came into collision with the water bottle and lost most of her trimmings.

It was really the Thanksgiving game that precipitated the plans for the senior entertainment for the library fund. The fire the year before had not only damaged the library considerably, but it had brought its shortcomings and the absurdly small number of its volumes, compared with the rapidly increasing number of the girls who used them, to the attention of the public. Somebody had offered fifty thousand dollars for a library fund provided the college raised an equal amount. The alumn? were trying to get the money, and because they had helped the undergraduates with their beloved Students' Building, they wanted the undergraduates to help them now.

On the very evening of the game Marie Howard, the senior president, caught Madeline on the way to Babbie's spread and laid the matter before her.

"The alums want us to subscribe to the fund," she explained, "and then they think each class ought to give an entertainment. Not a bit nervy, are they? Well, of course 19- has got to take the lead, and I've fairly racked my brains to think what we can do. Now it's no trouble to you to have lovely, comical ideas, and if you'll only help me out with this entertainment, I'll be your friend for life."

"Why don't you appoint a committee to take charge of it?" inquired Madeline, serenely.

Marie gave her a mournful look. "I suppose you think I haven't tried. The girls are all willing to help, but they insist upon having the idea to start with. I know you hate committees, Madeline, and I'm not asking you to be on one-"

"You'd better not," interpolated Madeline, darkly, remembering the drudgery she had submitted to to make the Belden House play a success.

"Just think up the idea," Marie went on, persuasively, "and I'll make a committee do the rest. I don't care what we have, so long as it's new and taking-the sort of thing that you always seem to have in your head. That's what we want. Plays and lectures are too commonplace."

"Marie," said Madeline, laughingly, "you talk as if ideas were cabbages and my head was a large garden. I can't produce ideas to order any more than the rest of you can. But if I should think of anything, I'll let you know."

"Thank you," said Marie, sweetly, and went back to her room, where she gave vent to some forcible remarks about the "exasperatingness" of clever people who won't let themselves be pinned down to anything.

It was Betty Wales who, dancing into Madeline's room the next afternoon, gave, not Madeline, but Eleanor Watson,-who had been having tea with Madeline and listening to her absurd version of Marie's request,-an inspiration.

"I wish it wasn't babyish to like toys," she sighed. "I've been down-town with Bob, and they've opened a big toy-shop in the store next Cuyler's, just for the holidays, I suppose. Bob got a Teddy bear, and I bought this box of fascinating little Japanese tops for my baby sister. They're all like different kinds of fruit and you spin them like pennies, without a string. I just love toy-stores."

"So do I. So does everybody," said Madeline, oracularly, clearing a place on the polished tea-table and emptying out the miniature tops. "They renew your youth. Let's get all these things to spinning at once, Betty."

"Why don't you have a toy-shop for your senior entertainment?" asked Eleanor, watching the two absorbed faces.

"How do you mean?" asked Madeline, absently, trying to make the purple plum she was manipulating stay upright longer than Betty's peach.

"Why, with live toys, something on the plan of the circus that you and Mary got up away back in sophomore year," explained Eleanor. "I should think you might work it up beautifully."

Madeline stared at her for a moment, her eyes half-closed. "Eleanor," she declared at last, "you're a genius. We could. I can fairly see my friends turning into toys. You and Betty and the rest of the class beauties are French dolls of course. Helen Adams would make a perfect jumping-jack-she naturally jerks along just like one."

"And Bob can be a jack-in-the-box," cried Betty eagerly, getting Madeline's idea.

"Or a monkey that climbs a rope," suggested Eleanor. "Don't you think Babe would pop out of a box better?"

"And that fat Miss Austin will be just the thing for a top," put in Madeline. "We can ask five cents for a turn at making her spin." And Madeline twirled the purple plum vigorously, in joyous anticipation of taking a turn at Miss Austin.

"Then there could be a counter of stuffed animals," suggested Eleanor, "with Emily Davis to show them off."

"Easily," agreed Madeline, "and a Noah's ark, if we want it, and a Punch and Judy show. Oh, there's no end to the things we can have! Let's go over and tell Marie about it before dinner."

"You and Betty go," objected Eleanor. "I really haven't time."

"Nonsense," said Madeline firmly. "It's long after five now, and-Eleanor Watson, are you trying to crawl out of your responsibilities? It was you that thought of this affair, remember."

"Please don't try to drag me in," begged Eleanor. "I'll be a doll, if you like, or anything else that you can see me turning into. But Marie didn't ask me to suggest, and she might feel embarrassed and obliged to ask me to be on the committee, and-please don't try to drag me in, Madeline."

Madeline looked at her keenly, for a moment. "Eleanor Watson," she began sternly, "you're thinking about last fall. Don't you know that that stupid girl didn't stand for anybody but her own stupid self?"

"She was in the right," said Eleanor simply.

"Not wholly," objected Madeline, "and if she was this isn't a parallel case. In making you toastmistress 19- was supposed to be doing you an honor. You're doing her a favor now, and a good big one."

"And if we tell Marie about the toy-shop, we shall tell her that you thought of it," put in Betty firmly.

"And we shall also say that you hate committee meetings as much as I do," put in Madeline artfully, "but that we are both willing to help in any way that we can with ideas and costumes."

Eleanor looked pleadingly from one to the other.

"We won't give in," declared Betty, "so it's no use to make eyes at us like that."

"Either we suppress the whole idea and 19- goes begging for another, or it stands as yours," said Madeline in adamant tones.

"Well, then, of course," began Eleanor slowly at last.

"Of course," laughed Betty, jumping up to hug her. "I knew you'd see it sensibly in a minute. Come on, Madeline. We haven't any time to lose."

"Do you remember what she was like two years ago, Betty?" asked Madeline thoughtfully when Eleanor had left them, persisting that she really had an engagement before dinner.

"I even remember what she was like three years ago," laughed Betty happily.

"Fancy her giving up a chance like this then!" mused Madeline. "Fancy her contributing ideas to the public good and trying to escape taking the credit for them. Why, Betty, she's a different person."

"I'm so glad you're friends now," said Betty, squeezing Madeline's arm lovingly.

"That's so," Madeline reflected. "We weren't two years ago. I used to hate her wire-pulling so. And now I suppose I'm pulling wires for her myself. Well, I'm going to be careful not to pull any of them down on her head this time. I say, Betty, wouldn't the Blunderbuss make a superb jack-in-the-box? I'm sure everybody would appreciate the symbolic effect when she popped, and perhaps we could manage to smother her by mistake between times."

The toy-shop took "like hot-cakes," to borrow Bob's pet comparison. Everybody told Madeline that it was just like her, and Madeline assured everybody gaily that she had always known she was misunderstood and that anyhow Eleanor Watson was responsible for the toy-shop. Having spent the better part of a day in spreading this information Madeline rushed off to New York on a vague and mysterious errand that had something to do with sub-letting the apartment on Washington Square.

* * *

"I remembered after I got down here," she wrote Betty a week later, "that I couldn't eat my solitary Christmas dinner in the flat if I let it. Besides my prospective tenants are bores, and bores never appreciate old furniture enough not to scratch it. But I'm staying on to oversee the fall cleaning, and we haven't had one for a good while, so it will take another week. I'm sorry not to be on hand for the toy-shop doings (don't you let them put it off, Betty, or I can never make up my work), but I send a dialogue-no, it's for four persons-on local issues for the Punch and Judy puppets. If they can't read it, tell them to cultivate their imaginations. I'll print the title, 'The Battle of the Classes,' to give them a starter.

"Miss me a little,

"Madeline.

"P. S. How are the wires working?"

If Eleanor suspected any hidden motive behind Madeline's sudden departure she had no way of confirming her theory, and when Betty escorted the entertainment committee, all of whom happened to be splendid workers but without a spark of originality among them, to Eleanor's room, and declaring sadly that she couldn't remember half the features of the toy-shop that they had discussed together, claimed Eleanor's half-promise of help, why there was nothing for Eleanor to do but redeem it. Nothing at least that the new Eleanor Watson cared to do. It was plain enough that the committee wanted her suggestions, and what other people might think of her motive for helping them really mattered very little in comparison with the success of 19-'s entertainment. Thus the new Eleanor Watson argued, and then she went to work.

"The wires are all right so far," Betty wrote Madeline. "The girls are all lovely, and they'd better be. Eleanor has arranged the dearest play for the dolls, all about a mad old German doll-maker who has a shop full of automatons and practices magic to try to bring them to life. Some village girls come in and one changes clothes with a doll and he thinks he's succeeded. Eleanor saw it somewhere, but she had to change it all around.

"Alice Waite wanted the dolls to give Ibsen's 'Doll's House.' She didn't know what it was about of course, or who wrote it. She just went by the name. The other classes have got hold of the joke and guy us to death.

"You'd better come back and have some of the fun. Besides, nobody can think how to make a costume for the mock-turtle. It's Roberta, and it's going to dance with the gryphon for the animal counter's side-show. Eleanor thought of that too."

But Madeline telegraphed Roberta laconically: "Gray carpet paper shell, mark scales shoe-blacking, lace together sides," and continued to sojourn in Washington Square.

Late in the afternoon of the toy-shop's grand opening she appeared in the door of the gymnasium and stood there a moment staring at the curious spectacle within.

The curtain was just going down on the dolls' pantomime, and the audience was applauding and hurrying off to make the rounds of the other attractions before dinner time. In clarion tones that made themselves heard above the din Emily Davis was advertising an auction of her animals, beginning with "one perfectly good baa-lamb."

"Hear him baa," cried Emily, "and you'll forget that his legs are wobbly."

"This way to the Punch and Judy," shouted Barbara Gordon hoarsely through a megaphone. "Give the children a season of refined and educating amusement. Libretto by our most talented satirist. Don't miss it."

"Hello, Madeline," cried Lucile Merrifield, spying the new arrival. "When did you get back? Come and see the puppets with me. They say your show is great."

"It all looks good to me," said Madeline, "but-is there a top to spin?"

Lucile laughed and nodded. "That fat Miss Austin has taken in two dollars already at five cents a spin. She says she used to love making cheeses, and that she hasn't had such a good time since she grew up."

"That's where I want to go first," said Madeline decisively; but on her way to the tops the doll counter beguiled her.

"Betty Wales," she declared, "when you curl in your lips and stare straight ahead you look just like the only doll I ever wanted. I saw her in a window on Fifth Avenue, and the one time in my life that I ever cried was when daddy wouldn't buy her for me. Where's Eleanor?"

"I don't know," said Betty happily. "She was here a minute ago playing for the dolls' pantomime. But she's all right. Everybody has been thanking her and praising the pantomime, and she's so pleased about it all. She told me that she had felt all this year as if everybody was pointing her out as a disgrace to the class and the college, and that she was beginning to think that her whole life was spoiled. And now-"

"Why, Madeline Ayres," cried Katherine Kittredge hurrying up to them, her hair disheveled and her hands very black indeed. "I'm awfully glad you've come. There's a class meeting to-morrow to decide on the senior play and I want-"

"You want tidying up," laughed Madeline. "What in the world have you been doing?"

"Being half of a woolly lamb," explained Katherine. "The other half couldn't come back this evening, so Emily has been selling us-or it, whichever you please-at auction. Now listen, Madeline. You don't know anything about this play business."

Madeline had heard Katherine's argument, spun Miss Austin, and seen the "Alice in Wonderland" animals dance before she found Eleanor, and by that time an interview with Jean Eastman had prepared her for the hurt look in Eleanor's eyes and the little quiver in her voice, as she welcomed Madeline back to Harding.

Jean was one of the few seniors who had had no active part in the toy-shop. "So I'm patronizing everything regardless," she exclaimed, sauntering up to Madeline and holding out a bag of fudge. "It's a decided hit, isn't it? Polly says the other classes are in despair at the idea of getting up anything that will take half as well."

"It's certainly a lovely show," said Madeline, trying the fudge.

"And a big feather in Eleanor Watson's cap," added Jean carelessly. "She always was the cleverest thing. I'd a lot rather be chairman of the play committee, or even a member of it, for that matter, than toastmistress. I suppose you know that there's a class-meeting to-morrow."

"Have you said that to Eleanor?" asked Madeline coldly.

"Oh, I gave her my congratulations on her prospects," said Jean with a shrug. "We're old friends, you know. We understand each other perfectly."

Madeline's eyes flashed. "It won't be the least use to tell you so," she said, "but lobbying for office is not the chief occupation of humanity as you seem to think. Neither Eleanor Watson nor any of her friends has thought anything about her being put on the play committee. I made the mistake once of supposing that our class as a whole was capable of appreciating the stand she's taken, and I shan't be likely to forget that I was wrong. But this affair was entirely her idea, and she deserves the credit for it."

"Oh, indeed," said Jean quickly. "I suppose you didn't send telegrams-"

But Madeline, her face white with anger was half way across the big hall.

Jean watched her tumultuous progress with a meaning smile. "Well, I've fixed that little game," she reflected. "If they did intend to put her up, they won't dare to now. They'll be afraid of seeing me do the Blunderbuss's act with variations. She'd have been elected fast enough, after this, and there isn't a girl in the class who could do half as well on that committee. But as for having her and that insufferable little Betty Wales on, when I shall be left off, I simply couldn't stand it."

Madeline found Betty taking off her doll's dress by dim candle-light, which she hoped would escape the eagle eye of the night-watchman. "I've come to tell you that the wires are all down again," she began, and went on to tell the story of Jean's carefully timed insinuations.

"I almost believe that the Blunderbuss was the tool of the Hill crowd," she said angrily. "At any rate they used her while she served, and now they're ready to take a hand themselves."

Betty stared at her in solemn silence. "What an awful lot it costs to lose your reputation," she said sadly.

"And it costs a good deal to be everybody's guardian angel, doesn't it, dearie?" Madeline said affectionately. "I oughtn't to have bothered you, but I seem to have made a dreadful mess of things so far."

"Oh, no, you haven't," Betty assured her. "Eleanor knows how queer Jean is, and what horrid things she says about people who won't follow her lead. None of that crowd would help about the toy-shop except Kate Denise, but every one else has been fine. And I know they haven't thought that Eleanor was trying to get anything out of them."

Madeline sighed mournfully. "In Bohemia people don't think that sort of thing," she said. "It complicates life so to have to consider it always. Good-night, Betty."

"Good-night," returned Betty cheerfully. "Don't forget that the senior 'Merry Hearts' have a tea-drinking to-morrow."

"I'm not likely to," laughed Madeline. "Every one of them that I've seen has mentioned it. They're all agog with curiosity."

"They'll be more so with joy, when I've told them the news," declared Betty, holding her candle high above her head to light Madeline through the hall.

"Dear me! I wish there could be a class without officers and committees and editors and commencement plays," she told the green lizard a little later. "Those things make such a lot of worry and hard feeling. But then I suppose it wouldn't be much of a class, if it wasn't worth worrying about. And anyway it's almost vacation."

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