There were the sets of dolls’ furniture, and the dolls, dishes, and there was a counter with dolls’ cooking-stoves and ranges bristling with the most delightful realism of pots and pans, at which she gazed so fixedly and breathlessly that she looked almost stupid.  Her elders watched half in delight, half with pain, that they could not purchase everything at which she looked.  Mrs. Zelotes bought some things surreptitiously, hiding the parcels under her shawl.  Andrew, whispering to a salesman, asked the price of a great cooking-stove at which Ellen looked long.  When he heard the amount he sighed.  Fanny touched his arm comfortingly.  “There would be no sense in your buying that, if you had all the money in creation,” she said, in a hushed voice.  “There’s a twenty-five-cent one that’s good enough.  I’m going to buy that for her to-morrow.  She’ll never know the difference.”  But Andrew Brewster, nevertheless, went through the great, dazzling shop with his heart full of bitterness.  It seemed to him monstrous and incredible that he had a child as beautiful and altogether wonderful as that, and could not buy the whole stock for her if she wanted it.  He had never in his whole life wanted anything for himself that he could not have, enough to give him pain, but he wanted for his child with a longing that was a passion.  Her little desires seemed to him the most important and sacred needs in the whole world.  He watched her with pity and admiration, and shame at his own impotence of love to give her all.

But Ellen knew nothing of it.  She was radiant.  She never thought of wanting all those treasures further than she already had them.  She gazed at the wonders in that department where the toy animals were kept, and which resembled a miniature menagerie, the silence broken by the mooing of cows, the braying of donkeys, the whistle of canaries, and the roars of mock-lions when their powers were invoked by the attendants, and her ears drank in that discordant bable of tiny mimicry like music.  There was no spirit of criticism in her.  She was utterly pleased with everything.

When her grandmother held up a toy-horse and said the fore-legs were too long, Ellen wondered what she meant.  To her mind it was more like a horse than any real one she had ever seen.

As she gazed at the decorations, the wreaths, the gauze, the tinsel, and paper angels, suspended by invisible wires over the counters, and all glittering and shining and twinkling with light, a strong whiff of evergreen fragrance came to her, and the aroma of fir-balsam, and it was to her the very breath of all the mysterious joy and hitherto untasted festivity of this earth into which she had come.  She felt deep in her childish soul the sense of a promise of happiness in the future, of which this was a foretaste.  When she went into the department where the dolls dwelt, she fairly turned pale.  They swung, and sat, and lay, and stood, as in angelic ranks, all smiling between shining fluffs of hair.  It was a chorus of smiles, and made the child’s heart fairly leap.  She felt as if all the dolls were smiling at her.  She clung fast to her mother’s hand, and hid her face against her skirt.