een built. Little
Charles Fox is allowed by his father to join us for the earlier stages
of dessert. I am conscious of patting him on the head and predicting
for him a distinguished future. A very bright little fellow, with
his father's eyes! Or again, I am down at Newstead. Byron is in his
wildest spirits, a shade too uproarious. I am glad to escape into
the park and stroll a quiet hour on the arm of Mr. Hughes Ball. Years
pass. The approach of Christmas finds one loth to leave one's usual
haunts. One is on one's way to one's club to dine with Postumus and
dear old "Wigsby" Pendennis, quietly at one's consecrated table near
the fireplace. As one is crossing St. James's Street an ear-piercing
grunt causes one to reel back just in time to be not run over by
a motor-car. Inside is a woman who scowls down at one through the
window--"Serve you right if we'd gone over you." Yes, I often have
these awakenings to fact--or rather these provisions of what life
might be if I survived into the twentieth century. Alas!

I have mentioned that woman in the motor-car because she is germane
to my theme. She typifies the vices of the modern Christmas. For her,
by the absurd accident of her wealth, there is no distinction between
people who have not motor-cars and people who might as well be run
over. But I wrong her. If we others were all run over, there would be
no one before whom she could flaunt her loathsome air of superiority.
And what would she do then, poor thing? I doubt she would die of
boredom--painfully, one hopes. In the same way, if the shop-keepers
in Bond Street knew there was no one who could not afford to buy the
things in their windows, there would be an end to the display that
makes those windows intolerable (to you and me) during the month of
December. I had often suspected that the things there were not meant
to be bought by people who could buy them, but merely to irritate the
rest. This afternoon I was sure of it. Not in one window anything
a sane person would give to any one not an idiot, but everywhere a
general glossy grin out at people who are not plutocrats. This sort
of thing lashes me to ungovernable fury. The lion is roused, and I
recognise in myself a born leader of men. Be so good as to smash those
windows for me.

One does not like to think that Christmas has been snapped up, docked
of its old-world kindliness, and pressed into the service of an odious
ostentation. But so it has. Alas! The thought of