“I promise.”
“Then all is well.” She kissed him lightly. “Luckily, I am young and you are young. We will talk of these things more, when you have more understanding.”
They never did, but Peter never forgot the lesson: he always used his napkin, even when those around him did not.
7
So Sasha died.
She has little more part in this story, yet there is one further thing about her you should know: she had a dollhouse. This dollhouse was very large and very fine, almost a castle in miniature. When the time of her marriage came round, Sasha mustered as much cheer as she could, but she was sad to be leaving everyone and everything at the great house in the Western Barony where she had grown up-and she was a little bit nervous, too. She told her mother, “I have never been married before and do not know if I shall like it.”
But of all the childish things she left behind, the one she regretted most was the dollhouse she had had ever since she was a little girl.
Roland, who was a kind man, somehow discovered this, and although he was also nervous about his future life (after all, he had never been married before, either), he found time to commission Quentin Ellender, the greatest craftsman in the land, to build his new wife a new dollhouse. “I want it to be the finest dollhouse a young lady ever had,” he told Ellender. “I want her to look at it once and forget about her old dollhouse forever.”