Chapter 10: The Princess Comes to Grief

And bring her rose-winged fancies,
From shadowy shoals of dream
To clothe her in the wistful hour
When girlhood steals from bud to flower;
Bring her the tunes of elfin dances,
Bring her the faery Gleam.—BURKE.
Christmas fell on a Saturday and a payday, and this, together with Mr. Demry’s party, accounts for the fact that the holiday spirit, which sometimes limps a trifle languidly past tenement doors, swaggered with unusual gaiety this year in Calvary Alley. You could hear it in the cathedral chimes which began at dawn, in the explosion of fire-crackers, in the bursts of noisy laughter from behind swinging doors. You could smell it in the whiffs of things frying, broiling, burning. You could feel it in the crisp air, in the crunch of the snow under your feet, and most of all you could see it in the happy, expectant faces of the children, who rushed in and out in a fever of excitement.

Early in the afternoon Nance Molloy, with a drab-colored shawl over her head and something tightly clasped in one bare, chapped fist, rushed forth on a mysterious mission. When she returned, she carried a pasteboard box hugged to her heart. The thought of tripping her fairy measure in worn-out shoes tied on with strings, had become so intolerable to her that she had bartered her holiday for a pair of white slippers. Mr. Lavinski had advanced the money, and she was to work six hours a day, instead of two, until she paid the money back.

But she was in no mood to reckon the cost, as she prepared for the evening festivities. So great was her energy and enthusiasm, that the contagion spread to the little Snawdors, each of whom submitted with unprecedented meekness to a “wash all over.” Nance dressed herself last, wrapping her white feet and legs in paper to keep them clean until the great hour should arrive.

“Why, Nance Molloy! You look downright purty!” Mrs. Snawdor exclaimed, when she came up after assisting Mr. Demry with his refreshments. “I never would ‘a’ believed it!”

Nance laughed happily. The effect had been achieved by much experimenting before the little mirror over her soap box. The mirror had a wave in it which gave the beholder two noses, but Nance had kept her pink and white ideal steadily in mind, and the result was a golden curl over a bare shoulder. The curl would have been longer had not half of it remained in a burnt wisp around the poker.

But such petty catastrophes have no place in a heart overflowing with joy. Nance did not even try to keep her twinkling feet from dancing; she danced through the table-setting and through the dish-washing, and between times she pressed her face to the dirty pane of the front window to see if the hands on the big cathedral clock were getting any nearer to five.

“They’re goin’ to have Christmas doin’s over to the cathedral, too,” she cried excitedly. “The boards is off the new window, an’ it’s jus’ like the old one, an’ ever’thing’s lit up, an’ it’s snowin’ like ever’thing!”

Mr. Demry’s party was to take place between the time he came home from the matinee and the time he returned for the evening performance. Long before the hour appointed, his guests began to arrive, dirty-faced and clean, fat and thin, tidy and ragged, big and little, but all wearing in their eyes that gift of nature to the most sordid youth, the gift of expectancy. There were fairies and ogres and pirates and Indians in costumes that needed only the proper imagination to make them convincing. If by any chance a wistful urchin arrived in his rags alone, Mr. Demry promptly evolved a cocked hat from a newspaper, and a sword from a box top, and transformed him into a prancing knight.