So they pretended and looked and looked and pretended till they had been over most all that part of the store.
"Now then," said Mrs. Merrill, "if we're to meet Dadah for lunch--"
"Oh, goody!" cried Alice, "are we to meet him here?"
"Not here," said Mrs. Merrill, "but in this store in the lunch room and in ten minutes. So we'd better wash our hands and go to the lunch room floor."
Mr. Merrill was waiting for them and had a table engaged close by a charming fountain ("Just think of a fountain in a house!" exclaimed Mary Jane when she spied it) and all the time Mary Jane sat there eating, she could look right over and watch the fishes and she could hear the splash of the water.
But Mary Jane wasn't thinking of fishes or water just then. She was hungry. And the things her father read to her sounded so good--oh, dear, but they did sound good! She and Alice had a dreadfully hard time deciding just what did sound the best. But Alice finally decided on stuffed chicken legs (she hadn't an idea what they were but they sounded good) and potato salad and strawberry parfait. And Mary Jane chose chicken pie--a whole one all her own--and hashed brown potatoes and orange sherbet.
While the lunch was being fixed, Mr. Merrill took Mary Jane over to the window so she could look down, down, way down, to the street below, where the folks appeared so little and upside down and where the automobiles looked like the ones they had just seen in the toy department.
When the lunch came, it proved to be just as good as the menu promised it would be and the girls enjoyed every bite. Mary Jane was afraid for a minute that she had made a mistake. For Alice's parfait came in a tall glass, with a long spoon that made the girls think of the story of the fox and the goose and the banquet, and Mary Jane was sure nothing she had ordered could be as nice as parfait. But when the maid set the orange sherbet at her place, Mary Jane was quite satisfied, for the ice was set in a real orange, all cut out in dainty scallops and trimmed with green.
"Yummy-um!" she whispered, happily. "I'm so glad you had this party, Dadah!"
Dadah seemed to want everything to be all right, for he had added to their order some little cakes, done up in frilly papers and unlike anything the girls had ever seen. They almost hated to eat them, they were so pretty, but cakes one cannot eat are not good for much, Mr. Merrill reminded them, and so the cakes were eaten up.