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 j.a.panese 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 soph.o.m.ore 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 cla.s.s 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 embarra.s.sed 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 a.s.sured 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 t.i.tle, 'The Battle of the Cla.s.ses,' 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 cla.s.ses have got hold of the joke and guy us to death.

"You'd better come back and have some of the fun. Besides, n.o.body 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 hoa.r.s.ely through a megaphone. "Give the children a season of refined and educating amus.e.m.e.nt. Libretto by our most talented satirist. Don't miss it."