The
animal toys looked more like natural history models than the comfortable,
sympathetic companions that one would wish, at a certain age, to take to
bed with one, and to smuggle into the bath-room. The mechanical toys
incessantly did things that no one could want a toy to do more than a
half a dozen times in its lifetime; it was a merciful reflection that in
any right-minded nursery the lifetime would certainly be short.
Prominent among the elegantly-dressed dolls that filled an entire section
of the window frontage was a large hobble-skirted lady in a confection of
peach-coloured velvet, elaborately set off with leopard skin accessories,
if one may use such a conveniently comprehensive word in describing an
intricate feminine toilette. She lacked nothing that is to be found in a
carefully detailed fashion-plate--in fact, she might be said to have
something more than the average fashion-plate female possesses; in place
of a vacant, expressionless stare she had character in her face. It must
be admitted that it was bad character, cold, hostile, inquisitorial, with
a sinister lowering of one eyebrow and a merciless hardness about the
corners of the mouth.
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