There was a table spread for four, with bits of broken china and shells for dishes, and pieces of apple and gingerbread for the feast. There were several dolls present (notably one without any head, who was not likely to shine at a dinner party), but Gay's first-born sat in her lap; and only a mother could have gazed upon such a battered thing and loved it. For Gay took her pleasures madly, and this faithful creature had shared them all; but not having inherited her mother's somewhat rare recuperative powers, she was now fit only for a free bed in a hospital,--a state of mind and body which she did not in the least endeavor to conceal. One of her shoe-button eyes dangled by a linen thread in a blood-curdling sort of way; her nose, which had been a pink glass bead, was now a mere spot, ambiguously located. Her red worsted lips were sadly raveled, but that she did not regret, "for it was kissin' as done it." Her yarn hair was attached to her head with safety-pins, and her internal organs intruded themselves on the public through a gaping wound in the side. Never mind! if you have any curiosity to measure the strength of the ideal, watch a child with her oldest doll. Rags sat at the head of the dinner-table, and had taken the precaution to get the headless doll on his right, with a view to eating her gingerbread as well as his own,--doing no violence to the proprieties in this way, but rather concealing her defects from a carping public. "I tell you sompfin' ittle Mit Vildy Tummins," Gay was saying to her battered offspring. "You 's doin' to have a new ittle sit-ter to-mowowday, if you 's a dood ittle dirl an does to seep nite an kick, you _ser-weet_ ittle Vildy Tummins!" (All this punctuated with ardent squeezes fraught with delicious agony to one who had a wound in her side!) "Vay fink you 's worn out, 'weety, but we know you isn't, don' we, 'weety? An I'll tell you nite ittle tory to-night, tause you isn't seepy. Wunt there was a ittle day hen 'at tole a net an' laid fir-teen waw edds in it, an bime bye erleven or seventeen ittle chits f'ew out of 'em, an Mit Vildy 'dopted 'em all! In 't that a nite tory, you _ser-weet_ ittle Mit Vildy Tummins?"