The Tin Soldier | Page 4

comes straight up Connecticut Avenue,
Hilda?"
Miss Merritt had long white hands which lay rather limply on the table.
Her arms were bare. She was handsome in a red-cheeked, blond
fashion.
"Of course if you think it is all right, Doctor--"
"It is up to Jean. If she isn't afraid, we needn't worry."
"I'm not afraid of anything."

He smiled at her. She was so pretty and slim and feminine in her white
gown, with a string of pearls on her white neck. He liked pretty things
and he liked her fearlessness. He had never been afraid. It pleased him
that his daughter should share his courage.
"Perhaps, if I am not too busy, I will come for you the next time you go
to the shop. Would walking with me break the spell of the wind and
wet?"
"You know it wouldn't. It would be quite--heavenly--Daddy."
After dinner, Doctor McKenzie read the evening paper. Jean sat on the
rug in front of the fire and knitted for the soldiers. She had made
sweaters until it seemed sometimes as if she saw life through a haze of
olive-drab.
"I am going to knit socks next," she told her father.
He looked up from his paper. "Did you ever stop to think what it means
to a man over there when a woman says 'I'm going to knit socks'?"
Jean nodded. That was one of the charms which her father had for her.
He saw things. It was tired soldiers at this moment, marching in the
cold and needing--socks.
Hilda, having no vision, remarked from the corner where she sat with
her book, "There's no sense in all this killing--I wish we'd kept out of
it."
"Wasn't there any sense," said little Jean from the hearth rug, "in
Bunker Hill and Valley Forge?"
Hilda evaded that. "Anyhow, I'm glad they've stopped playing the
'Star-Spangled Banner' at the movies. I'm tired of standing up."
Jean voiced her scorn. "I'd stand until I dropped, rather than miss a note
of it."
Doctor McKenzie interposed:

"'The time has come,' the Walrus said, 'To talk of many things, Of
shoes--and ships--and sealing wax-- Of cabbages--and kings--'"
"Oh, Daddy," Jean reproached him, "I should think you might be
serious."
"I am not just twenty--and I have learned to bank my fires. And you
mustn't take Hilda too literally. She doesn't mean all that she says, do
you, Hilda?"
He patted Miss Merritt on the shoulder as he went out. Jean hated that.
And Hilda's blush.
With the Doctor gone, Hilda shut herself up in the office to balance her
books.
Jean went on with her knitting, Hilda did not knit. When she was not
helping in the office or in the house, her hands lay idle in her lap.
Jean's mind, as she worked, was on those long white hands of Hilda's.
Her own hands had short fingers like her father's. Her mother's hands
had been slender and transparent. Hilda's hands were not slender, they
had breadth as well as length, and the skin was thick. Even the
whiteness was like the flesh of a fish, pale and flabby. No, there was no
beauty at all in Hilda's hands.
Once Jean had criticised them to her father. "I think they are ugly."
"They are useful hands, and they have often helped me."
"I like Emily's hands much better."
"Oh, you and your Emily," he had teased.
Yet Jean's words came back to the Doctor the next night, as he sat in
the Toy Shop waiting to escort his daughter home.
Miss Emily was serving a customer, a small boy in a red coat and
baggy trousers. A nurse stood behind the small boy, and played, as it

were, Chorus. She wore a blue cape and a long blue bow on the back of
her hat.
The small boy was having the mechanical toys wound up for him. He
expressed a preference for the clowns, but didn't like the colors.
"I want him boo'," he informed Miss Emily, "he's for a girl, and she
yikes boo'."
"Blue," said the nurse austerely, "you know your mother doesn't like
baby talk, Teddy."
"Ble-yew--" said the small boy, carefully.
"Blue clowns," Miss Emily stated, sympathetically, "are hard to get.
Most of them are red. I have the nicest thing that I haven't shown you.
But it costs a lot--"
"It's a birfday present," said the small boy.
"Birthday," from the Chorus.
"Be-yirthday," was the amended version, "and I want it nice."
Miss Emily brought forth from behind the glass doors of a case a small
green silk head of lettuce. She set it on the counter, and her fingers
found the key, then clickety-click, clickety-click, she wound it up. It
played a faint tune, the leaves opened--a rabbit with a wide-frilled
collar rose