In a somewhat Louis Seize room several wondrous wax girls and the same number of young men, with extremely broad shoulders and slender hips, were dancing a decorous tango.  But, if they tired of that, they had only to move on a section, to find a party of four young people playing tennis in appropriate costumes against a trellis of crimson ramblers.  Strange to say, a mere wall divided this summer scene from sports in the high Alps.  There was gorgeous fun going on in this portion of window world, where men and girls were skeeing, tobogganing, and snowballing each other in deep cotton snow.  Next door they were skating on a surface so mirrorlike that, in fact, it was a mirror.

A little farther on a young wax mother of no more than eighteen was in a nursery, caressing an immense family of wax children of all ages, from babyhood up to twelve years.  A grandmother was there, too, and a hospital nurse, and several playful dogs and cats.  In another house they were having a Christmas tree, and Santa Claus had come in person to be master of ceremonies.  How the children on the other side of a partition, engaged in learning lessons at school desks, must have envied those whose Christmas had prematurely come!  But best of all was the automobile race; or, perhaps, the zoo of window world, where Teddy bears and Teddy monkeys and Teddy snakes and Teddy everythings disported themselves together among trees and flowers in Peter Rolls’s conception of Eden.

Win had often glanced into these windows before, hurrying nervously past, but now she lingered, trying to fill her heart with the waxen peace of that luxurious land of leisure.  She walked very slowly all around the great square, three sides of which were crystal, the fourth being given up to huge open doors, through which streamed men and parcels and hurled themselves into motor vans.  The idea flashed into the girl’s head that here was the cemetery of window land.  In those big boxes and packages that men furiously yet indifferently carried out, were the dolls or animals that had smiled or romped behind the plate glass, or the dresses and hats, the tennis rackets and toboggans they had fondly thought their own.

This promenade of inspection and introspection put off the evil minute for a while; but the time came when Win must hook herself on to the tail of a procession constantly entering at an inconspicuous side door, or else go home with the project abandoned.

“Of course I shall never see Peter Rolls or his sister here,” she told herself for the twentieth time, and passed through the door almost on the back of an enormous young man, while a girl closed in behind her with the intimacy of a sardine.

“Gee!  Get on to the tall Effect in brown!” murmured a voice.

“Ain’t she the baby doll?” another voice wanted to know.

Winifred heard, and realized that she was the Effect and baby doll in question.  She flushed, and her ears tingled.  She thought of the Arabian Nights tale, where the searcher after the Golden Water was pestered by voices of those who had been turned to black stones on the way.