Page:I Know a Secret (1927).pdf/90

 comfortable that she was thinking chiefly of her own troubles. A person so sensitive that even a pea under the mattress kept her awake, naturally suffered terribly in such crowded quarters.

Then one fine day some leading spirit among the marionettes suggested a new idea, that they should put on a play of their own. It had never occurred to them before that they might do this, but after all, why not? Quite a buzz of talk rose from the box as they argued about it. Some refused to believe that it could be done without the Manager to handle the strings. But they decided to try. Stiff from lying idle so long they clambered out of the box and stretched themselves.

The great difficulty was to get their strings untangled. Shuffling round in the box, the delicate threads had got all snarled together. This is quite likely to happen to marionettes unless they are put away very carefully. If the tangle is badly complicated they can never unravel it themselves. They have to wait for the Manager. There was a quarrelsome time while they all pulled and tweaked and twisted. They all had different ideas about what to do with their strings when they disentangled them. Some