| “What's
your name?” he asked.
“Wendy Moira
Angela Darling,” she replied with some satisfaction.
“What is your name?”
“Peter Pan.”
She was already
sure that he must be Peter, but it did seem a comparatively
short name.
“Is that all?”
“Yes,”
he said rather sharply. He felt for the first time that it
was a shortish name.
“I'm so sorry,”
said Wendy Moira Angela.
“It doesn't
matter,” Peter gulped.
She asked where
he lived.
“Second to
the right,” said Peter, “and then straight on
till morning.”
“What a funny
address!”
Peter had a sinking.
For the first time he felt that perhaps it was a funny address.
“No, it isn't,”
he said.
“I mean,”
Wendy said nicely, remembering that she was hostess, “is
that what they put on the letters?”
He wished she had
not mentioned letters.
“Don't get
any letters,” he said contemptuously.
“But your
mother gets letters?”
“Don't have
a mother,” he said. Not only had he no mother, but he
had not the slightest desire to have one. He thought them
very over-rated persons. Wendy, however, felt at once that
she was in the presence of a tragedy.
“O Peter,
no wonder you were crying,” she said, and got out of
bed and ran to him.
“I wasn't
crying about mothers,” he said rather indignantly. “I
was crying because I can't get my shadow to stick on. Besides,
I wasn't crying.”
“It has come
off?”
“Yes.”
Then Wendy saw the
shadow on the floor, looking so draggled, and she was frightfully
sorry for Peter. “How awful!” she said, but she
could not help smiling when she saw that he had been trying
to stick it on with soap. How exactly like a boy!
Fortunately she
knew at once what to do. “It must be sewn on,”
she said, just a little patronizingly.
“What's sewn?”
he asked.
“You're dreadfully
ignorant.”
“No, I'm not.”
But she was exulting
in his ignorance. “I shall sew it on for you, my little
man,” she said, though he was tall as herself, and she
got out her housewife [sewing bag], and sewed the shadow on
to Peter's foot.
“I daresay
it will hurt a little,” she warned him.
“Oh, I shan't
cry,” said Peter, who was already of the opinion that
he had never cried in his life. And he clenched his teeth
and did not cry, and soon his shadow was behaving properly,
though still a little creased.
“Perhaps I
should have ironed it,” Wendy said thoughtfully, but
Peter, boy-like, was indifferent to appearances, and he was
now jumping about in the wildest glee. Alas, he had already
forgotten that he owed his bliss to Wendy. He thought he had
attached the shadow himself. “How clever I am!”
he crowed rapturously, “oh, the cleverness of me!”
It is humiliating
to have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one of his
most fascinating qualities. To put it with brutal frankness,
there never was a cockier boy.
But for the moment
Wendy was shocked. “You conceit,” she exclaimed,
with frightful sarcasm; “of course I did nothing!”
“You did a
little,” Peter said carelessly, and continued to dance.
“A little!”
she replied with hauteur; “if I am no use I can at least
withdraw,” and she sprang in the most dignified way
into bed and covered her face with the blankets.
To induce her to
look up he pretended to be going away, and when this failed
he sat on the end of the bed and tapped her gently with his
foot. “Wendy,” he said, “don't withdraw.
I can't help crowing, Wendy, when I'm pleased with myself.”
Still she would not look up, though she was listening eagerly.
“Wendy,” he continued, in a voice that no woman
has ever yet been able to resist, “Wendy, one girl is
more use than twenty boys.”
|