Little Doors Read Free Page B

in the very center of the stacked doors, as if the very last portal, however far away and miniscule, opened onto another, more verdant world.
    The title was not given on the cover.
    Intrigued, Crawleigh opened the book. Inside, beneath the copyright information, was the colophon of the publishers, Drinkwater & Sons: an eccentric house with gables, turrets, chimneys and at least a dozen doors in it on all levels.
    Here at last, on the facing page, was title and author:
     
    LITTLE DOORS
    by
    Alfred Bigelow Strayhorn
     
    Crawleigh flipped to page one and began to read.
     
Once upon a time … began the story Princess Ordinary was trying to read but couldn’t.
     
    Odd opening, thought Crawleigh. He had expected to be introduced right away to the heroine mentioned by Judd Mitchell, named Judy. Oh well, auctorial intentions were not always immediately fathomable, even (especially?) in children’s literature. On with the story.
     
Princess Ordinary finally gave up and tossed the book of fairy tales down with a pettish sigh.
“Drat it all!” she exclaimed, and kicked her satin hassock with her pretty little velvet-shod foot. “Why can’t I enter these old tales as if they were my own dreams, as I once did when I was a child? Surely one doesn’t lose talents as one grows older, but only gains new skills, moving on from strength to strength. At least that’s the way things should be.” The Princess paused for a moment. “At least they should be that way for princesses, who are special, even if they’re as ordinary and drab as I fear I am.”
The Princess stood up then, and moved to a wood-framed mirror that stood across the room from her. (The Princess was to be found this morning in her luxurious bedroom, for that was where she liked best to read, and lately she had taken to staying in the one room almost all day.)
At the mirror, she pirouetted with rather more abandon than she felt, holding out her full skirts with one hand to add a little extra graceful touch she had seen her mother employ at royal dances. But in spite of all her airs, Princess Ordinary was forced to admit that the reflection greeting her gaze was that of a young woman whom no one would ever call beautiful. Her hair was an awful coal-black—everyone in this kingdom thought only golden hair was to be admired—and her nose and chin were sharp in a way that betokened a certain sullenness. No, the Princess was just what her name implied: a common sort of girl who, except for the accident of her royal birth, might just as easily have been found waiting on customers in a shop; which of course is not to say that she hadn’t a good heart and soul that were to be cherished as much as those of a real beauty, but only that they could not be so easily inferred from her appearance.
Princess Ordinary spun the mirror—which was mounted in a frame on pins through its middle—so that the glass faced to the wall. Now, curiously enough, the wood used for this mirror had once been a door (there was a shortage of lumber at the time) and it still retained its handle on the back side. Seeing the silly handle to a door that could never be opened, the Princess laughed, but only for a moment. She was soon sober again.
“Not only am I ordinary” she cried in a fit of pique, “but the whole world is quite unimaginative and boring! There isn’t a single thing in it that interests me any more, and I wish I could leave it all behind!”
At that exact moment, the Princess’s tutor appeared in the door. He had come looking for her for her daily lesson (for the Princess wasn’t so old that she had quit learning, nor should any of us ever be), and when he heard the Princess’s wish, he was moved to let out a blast of steam.
The tutor, you see, was a mechanical man named Steel Daniel, and had been constructed especially to be Princess Ordinary’s companion. Consequently, he had great affection for her and did not like to see her upset.
“Is that really what you desire,