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.
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