Winnie Childs, the Shop Girl

								

very large screen, a few chairs, and a sofa or two.
The next best thing to the forbidden one--opening the door again to
ask the beings point-blank whether they were pipe dreams or just
mermaids--was to go on to the gymnasium and inquire there. Toward this
end young Mr. Rolls (as he was respectfully called in a business house
never mentioned by his sister) immediately took steps. But taking
steps was as far as he got. Suddenly it seemed a deed you could not
do, to demand of an imitation-camel's attendant why five young ladies
wore evening dress in the morning in a room three doors away.
After all, why should a camel attendant dare to know anything about
them? Perhaps they were merely amusing themselves and each other by
trying on all their gladdest clothes. There might be girls who would
think this a good way to kill time in a storm. Yes, conceivably there
might be such girls, just as there might be sea serpents; but, though
Peter Rolls was too shy to have learned much about the female of his
species, the explanation did not appeal to his reason.
His mind would persist in making a mystery of the mirror-walled room
with its five dazzling occupants, and even the bumpings of the
imitation camel could not jerk out of his head speculations which
played around the dryad door. He was as curious as Fatima herself,
and with somewhat the same curiosity; for, except that in one case the
beautiful ladies had their heads, and in the other had lost them,
there was a hint of resemblance between the two mysteries.
Peter Rolls wondered whether he would like to ask his sister Ena if
she knew the visions, or even if, being a woman, she could form any
theory to account for them. It would be interesting to see what she
would say; but then, unless she were too seasick, she would probably
laugh, and perhaps tell Lord Raygan.
As for the visions themselves, only one had spirit enough left in her
to be able to laugh at being thought a dryad or a mystery. She alone
of the five would have known what "dryad" means. And she could always
laugh, no matter how miserable or how sick she was.
That day she was very sick indeed. They were all very sick, but she
could not help seeing, at her worst, that it was funny.
"For heaven's sake, what are you giggling at?" snapped the longest,
slimmest, most abnormal dryad, diaphanously draped in yellow, when she
could gasp out an intelligible sentence after an exhausting bout of
agony.
"Us," said the girl who could always laugh, a vision in silver.
"Us? I don't see anything funny about us!" groaned a tall dream in
crimson and purple.
"Funny! I should think not!" snorted a fantasy in emerald.
"It makes me worse to hear you laugh," squealed a radiance in rose.
"I wish we were all dead, especially Miss Child," snarled the last
of the five, a symphony in black and all conceivable shades of blue.
Because of this combination, the Miss Child in question had named her