Could it be
that both worlds were real? Even now, at his tender years, that old
business of connecting the Dream and the Business was at his throat.
"Teal Tea! Tea!" Frantic screams from May. "There's some new jam, and,
John, mother says she wants you to try on some underclothes afterwards.
Those others didn't do, she said...."
There came then the disastrous hour--an hour that John was never, in all
his after-life, to forget. On a wild stormy evening he found himself in
the nursery. A week remained now--to-day fortnight he would be in
another world, an alarming, fierce, tremendous world. He looked at the
rocking-horse with its absurd tail and the patch on its back, that had
been worn away by its faithful riders, and suddenly he was crying. This
was a thing that he never did, that he had strenuously, persistently
refrained from doing all these weeks, but now, in the strangest way, it
was the conviction that the world into which he was going wouldn't care
in the least for the doll's-house, and would mock brutally, derisively
at the rocking-horse, that defeated him. It was even the knowledge
that, in a very short time, he himself would be mocking.
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