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and green peas and mashed potatoes, and a cherry tart from Mrs Innisfree’s bottled cherries.
    After lunch they looked through the patterns and silk and chose a small pattern that was part of a larger pattern; it was moss rosebuds in crimson and pink, with green leaves, on a cream
background. ‘And we must have this copper colour for the stems,’ said Mrs Innisfree, ‘and I shall use this peacock blue for the shading.’
    ‘Can you shade so tiny?’ asked Emily.
    ‘I think I can,’ said Mrs Innisfree.
    ‘I think you can do anything,’ said Charlotte, and that evening she said to Emily, ‘Do you know, Emily, Mrs Innisfree reminds me of Tottie.’
    ‘Of Tottie?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Can a real person remind you of a doll?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Charlotte, ‘but Mrs Innisfree does.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps it’s because Tottie never breaks or gets spoilt. I miss
Tottie,’ said Charlotte.
    They had asked to peep at Tottie before they left Mrs Innisfree, and how surprised Tottie was to see their faces bending over her.
    ‘Is this all a bad dream?’ asked Tottie of herself. ‘Am I at home again?’ But as soon as Charlotte lifted her up she saw that she was in a strange room and that the box
still lay on the table. ‘It isn’t a dream,’ cried Tottie in Charlotte’s hand. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’
    ‘Why does she look so unhappy?’ asked Charlotte.
    ‘A pound and a shilling! A guinea. After a hundred years,’ said Tottie.
    ‘She looks – angry,’ said Emily. Both of them could feel Tottie wishing, but they could not understand why she should wish, and they put her back into the box and covered her
up with tissue paper.
    ‘When does she go to the Exhibition?’ she heard Emily ask, just before they put on the lid.
    ‘To the Exhibition! To the Exhibition!’ said Tottie in a cry so loud that every knot and grain of her felt twisted, but, of course, not a sound came out of the box.

Chapter 8
    Marchpane had been seen by someone at the cleaners who had taken her address and written to the great-aunt’s relations to ask if Marchpane too might not come to the
Exhibition.
    The great-aunt’s relations said yes.
    Marchpane was delighted.

Chapter 9
    When Tottie was next taken out of her box she found herself in a large cold room that had long tables, covered with blue cloth, against each wall, and a number of ladies all
busy unpacking dolls.
    Tottie had never seen so many ladies and so many dolls, particularly so many dolls. There was every kind of doll: baby dolls, little girl dolls, boy dolls, lady and gentleman dolls, soldier
dolls, sailor dolls, acting dolls, dancing dolls, clockwork dolls, fairy dolls, Chinese dolls, Polish, Japanese, French, German, Russian. There was a white wax doll with exquisite white china
hands, and a Dutch fisherman with a basket on his back, and a Flemish doll in market clothes, and her cook sitting down with her basket. There were Japanese dolls with blank white faces, and
Chinese dolls whose faces were as alive as snakes, with painted snaky eyebrows and long noses; they were dancers and ceremonial dolls with satin trousers and red-painted shoes. There were two
little German dolls with yellow fringes and gentle brown eyes and peasant clothes, and a Polichinelle, very old, with his legs drawn up and a carved, frightening, evil face. There was every kind
and sort of doll and they filled the room, each standing in its place and showing what kind of doll it was. Some of them were very handsome and imposing; all of them, without exception, were far,
far larger than Tottie.
    She felt small and shy and longed to go home. ‘But I can’t go home,’ said Tottie. ‘I shall never go home again,’ and her secret trouble filled her so strongly that,
if wood could have drooped, Tottie would have drooped. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ cried poor little Tottie, and she thought of them all at home: Mr Plantaganet, Birdie, Darner, Apple; when she
thought of Apple she felt as if