ONCE upon a time there was a very beautiful doll's house; it was red brick with white windows, and it had real muslin curtains and a front door and a chimney.
THE doll's house stood at the other side of the fireplace.
THE little girl that the doll's house belonged to said: "I will get a doll dressed like a policeman!"
It was a wonderful doll's house, with dolls at tea downstairs and dolls going to bed upstairs, and a doll showing a doll out at the front door.
I bought the doll's house, and as they knew the lady's address (it was at this shop that I first learned her name) I instructed them to send it back to her with the following letter, which I wrote in the shop: "Dear madam, don't be ridiculous.
She was on her knees drawing the doll's house from beneath the sofa, where it had been hidden away; and immediately I thought, "I shall slip the insulting message into this." But I did not, and I shall tell you why.
The little doll's house was almost ready for further use.
The play was The
Doll's House and the author was Henrik Ibsen.
She had been remarkable, when a tender prattler for an uncommon talent in counterfeiting the walk and manner of a bailiff: in which character she had learned to tap her little playfellows on the shoulder, and to carry them off to imaginary sponging-houses, with a correctness of imitation which was the surprise and delight of all who witnessed her performances, and which was only to be exceeded by her exquisite manner of putting an execution into her
doll's house, and taking an exact inventory of the chairs and tables.
One little nook, for instance, was no larger than an unusually big
doll's house, and yet it might have been a model for the whole place, for the water dropped, tiny icicles hung, and spar columns were forming in just the same way.
Having spread the quilt and folded my night-dress, I went to the window-seat to put in order some picture-books and
doll's house furniture scattered there; an abrupt command from Georgiana to let her playthings alone (for the tiny chairs and mirrors, the fairy plates and cups, were her property) stopped my proceedings; and then, for lack of other occupation, I fell to breathing on the frost-flowers with which the window was fretted, and thus clearing a space in the glass through which I might look out on the grounds, where all was still and petrified under the influence of a hard frost.
You push one of the handles down - which no one ever does - and the whole of that end opens like the front of a
doll's house. I saw that was what I ought to have done at first: it's so much simpler than the trap at the top; and one likes to get a thing perfect for its own sake.
doll's house - a house so small that it is likened to a child's plaything