Malice narrows curiosity. In the back seat of the creaking car a small, white cottage caught and held the leaden sky glow, its tiny windows gleaming like uncut jewels.
A man of wide and kindly sympathies would have taken delight in the cottage, for though it was a cheap toy it had been built with great respect for the critical eye of childhood. It had eight rooms, a porch trellis, and a little golden weathercock on its roof.
Durkin smiled spitefully, remembering with grim pleasure the child training article in the popular science magazine which had sent him into town in search of an inexpensive doll house.
The article had contained a great deal of meat, and its impact upon his mind had been remarkably direct. Give a kid a doll house with a mother and father doll inside, and you could find out exactly what he thought of his parents. He’d move the dolls around, and work out his private grudges on them. He’d pretend the dolls were his real parents, and act out what the article had called the family drama.
Yeah, why not? A man had a right to know what his own kids thought of him, hadn’t he? Especially if they were stepkids, and owed everything to him. Apart from the fact that the article had been against punishing children the way he’d been punished as a kid—and what better way was there?—its ideas were good.
The article had contained a lot of fancy phrases like “harmful emotional repression,” and “healthful release of guilt feelings.” But giving a grudge a fancy name didn’t change it one bit. If the kids he’d fed and clothed hated him his hand would come down heavy on them. Yes, by heaven. Each whack would ring out like a pistol shot.
It was high noon when Durkin came in sight of the farmhouse, and saw the children playing in the yard, and his wife standing in the kitchen door. Her stringy black hair annoyed him far out of proportion to its importance, and he was further incensed by the realization that she was staring up the road as if she had another complaint to make, and could hardly wait for him to come within earshot.
He drove into the yard muttering unpleasantly to himself. Abruptly his stepson Robert—a tall, freckled-faced youngster of nine—stopped playing. Seven-year-old Emily, thoughtful-eyed and less assertive, remained seated, but Durkin could see that there was a defiant something struggling in her head.
The ritual of mistrust they’d worked out against him never varied. As he descended from the car he became aware of a hostile silence hemming him in, making him feel like a stranger. Even their expressions betrayed them. The instant fear came into Robert’s eyes Emily too became fearful, clutching the doll she was holding more tightly to her breast.
Flushed and resentful, Durkin stood waiting for his wife to advance toward him across the yard. She had been beautiful once, but she now only reminded him of a nag set out to pasture after years of usefulness about the farm. She was as handy about the farm as she was about a stove, but that didn’t mean he had to be grateful to her.
He’d taken her in and married her, hadn’t he? A woman of forty with two kids, a complaining woman who was always trying to meddle in his affairs.
“You’re back early, Will!” Helen Durkin said.
“Yeah,” he grunted, eyeing her bitterly.
“Did you buy the fertilizer, and the barbed wire?”
He shook his head, his lips writhing back from his teeth in cruel derision.
“I bought something better,” he said. His voice was harsh, edged with mockery. “A present for the kids.”
Durkin reached into the car as he spoke, and hauled out the doll house. He set it down on the stony soil directly in front of him, and folded his arms, his eyes darting toward his stepson in surly challenge.
“Come here, Robbie!” he called out. “Look what I’ve got for you!”
Robert scrambled to his feet with a startled gasp, and Emily turned to look at her mother in bewilderment, Durkin glanced triumphantly at his wife, stepped back, and waited for the children to approach.
Robert came forward slowly, stark incredulity in his stare. His sister followed at a less cautious pace, her fear swallowed up by the miracle that had taken place before her very eyes.
Robert spoke first. “Golly, it’s a little house.”
“A doll house!” Emily elaborated, falling to her knees, and staring in through the diamond-bright windows at a sight that made her catch her breath.
In a room on the ground floor four dolls sat at a circular table. Before each was a knife and fork, a tiny plate and a double serving of wax vegetables. The husband doll wore a stiff, ill-fitting store suit, the wife a checkered gingham dress, and the two children blue denim overalls.
The parents were wooden dolls, but Durkin had been forced to purchase the children separately, and insert them in the house. The children were made of some newfangled plastic material which Durkin intensely disliked. But very lifelike dolls they were, and just the right size to lend wings to the illusion of a happy family about to break bread together.
“That’s me!” Emily cried excitedly.
She raised a window, reached inside, and lifted “herself” out. The doll had dark hair and brown eyes, and Emily was an ash blond. But childhood is not a time for carping, and it has been well established that a completely unspoiled imagination can be sent soaring by a fancied resemblance in the twinkling of an eye.
“That’s me, isn’t it, Mommy?” Emily insisted. “Isn’t it?”
She displayed the doll proudly to her mother, her eyes shining with unshakable conviction.
“Yes, dear—of course.” Helen Durkin glanced sharply at her husband as she spoke. The look in his eyes
