"Sometimes when I have spoken up like a little man you have made me feel like a little donkey."
"I don’t see how you can like me at all, Jack," returned Mildred naïvely. "I made up my mind this morning that I was going to try to be more like Clover."
"Capital scheme!" exclaimed Van Tassel, with so much enthusiasm that Mildred felt disconcerted.
"I don’t suppose the leopard can change his spots, though," she returned, rather stiffly.
"Let us go to Hagenbeck’s and see," suggested Jack.
"It is rather far from here if we are going to do the shows with any system."
"Do you wish to, Mildred? Don’t let me bore you."
"It only bores me to have you want me to be like somebody else."
Jack’s lips drew together in an inaudible whistle, and it needed all Clover’s warnings to aid him in holding the rein over himself. They were aimlessly walking east.
"But I honestly don’t blame you," she added. "I have done nothing to make it pleasant for you here. In your own home it didn’t seem necessary to treat you like a guest."
"You are right. There was no necessity in the matter; there isn’t now. Perhaps you really wish to go home."
"Clover wouldn’t go if she did wish it," Mildred smiled at him with a sidelong glance, "and so I will stay."
"Not with me," said Jack, lifting his hat and looking very firm as he paused in the road.
"Then you take it back that you wish me to be like little sister?" Mildred also paused, still smiling at him with her chin lifted.
"I am honest. I want to stay, you uncivil man."
The magic carpet in the Arabian Nights which transported its owner from one country to another, remote, in the space of a few seconds, was the property of all visitors to the Midway Plaisance. Mildred and Jack spent a little time amid the Swiss Alps, the former amusing herself by picking out for Jack’s benefit localities where she and Clover had traveled. Then they looked in at the Bedouin Encampment and saw an old woman making bread. She whirled the dough on one hand until it spread into a very thin sheet. This she flapped over a cushion and from thence transferred it to the top of an inverted iron basin, where it baked above burning sticks. It looked when cooked like a delicate cracker, as it was broken up and passed around to the spectators.