to summon up the
emotions connected with them. I had no desires now: I could buy anything
in reason in the whole street. What did Matthew and Moreton want? and
little Biddy? Maude had not "spoiled" them; but they didn't seem to have
any definite wants. The children made me think, with a sudden softening,
of Tom Peters, and I went into a tobacconist's and bought him a box of
expensive cigars. Then I told the chauffeur to take me to a toy-shop,
where I stood staring through a plate-glass window at the elaborate
playthings devised for the modern children of luxury. In the centre
was a toy man-of-war, three feet in length, with turrets and guns, and
propellers and a real steam-engine. As a boy I should have dreamed about
it, schemed for it, bartered my immortal soul for it. But--if I gave
it to Matthew, what was there for Moreton? A steam locomotive caught my
eye, almost as elaborate. Forcing my way through the doors, I captured
a salesman, and from a state bordering on nervous collapse he became
galvanized into an intense alertness and respect when he understood my
desires. He didn't know the price of the objects in question. He brought
the proprietor, an obsequious little German who, on learning my name,
repeated it in every sentence. For Biddy I chose a doll that was all but
human; when held by a young woman for my inspection, it elicited murmurs
of admiration from the women shoppers by whom we were surrounded. The
proprietor promised to make a special delivery of the three articles
before seven o'clock....

Presently the automobile, after speeding up the asphalt of Grant Avenue,
stopped before the new house. In spite of the change that house had made
in my life, in three weeks I had become amazingly used to it; yet I had
an odd feeling that Christmas eve as I stood under the portico with
my key in the door, the same feeling of the impersonality of the place
which I had experienced before. Not that for one moment I would have
exchanged it for the smaller house we had left. I opened the door. How
often, in that other house, I had come in the evening seeking quiet, my
brain occupied with a problem, only to be annoyed by the romping of the
children on the landing above. A noise in one end of it echoed to the
other. But here, as I entered the hall, all was quiet: a dignified,
deep-carpeted stairway swept upward before me, and on either side were
wide, empty rooms; and in the subdued light of one of them I saw a dark
figure