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 hurriedly explained. "But don't
you stand for it. You don't have to! Just hand 'em along to me, and
I'll make 'em sorry their fathers ever seen their mothers."
Sadie's story of girl life in Toyland was on the same lines, but with
a different moral.
"Don't you tell tales out o' school, no matter what any of the chaps
_do_," was her advice. "I kin hold my own, and I bet you can. You may
be a looker, but you ain't anybody's baby doll. If a feller calls you
'childie' or 'sweet lamb' or tells you you're the peacherino in the
peach basket, don't you answer back, but just smile and wend your
ways. If he goes so far as to put his arm around your waist or take a
nip with his nails out of your arm or hip, why, then you can land him
one on the napper if nobody's lookin'. But all the same, the chaps
mostly ain't so black at heart. They just try to decorate their gray
lives a bit, and if those sort of things didn't happen to me once or
twicet a day, why I'd be discouraged and think I'd lost my fatal
beauty.
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