She found long-haired Shetland ponies big enough to ride, glorified hobby horses clad in real skins, and unglorified ones with nostrils like those of her landlady in Columbus Avenue.  Biscuit-coloured Jersey cows, which could be milked, gazed mildly into space with expensive glass eyes.  Noah’s arks, big enough to be lived in if the animals would move up, seemed to have been painted with Bakst colours.  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.

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.”