ays is more of women's letters.
Their minds and pens are so charmingly facile; there is nothing a woman
can do better than talk, except to write.

Bulstrode smoked slowly, the pages between his fingers, his thoughts
travelling like wanderers towards a home from which a ban had kept them
aliens. His eyes drifted to the beginning of the letter. He wasn't
familiar with the homeless vagrant class. His charities to that part
of the population consisted in donations to established societies, and
haphazard giving called forth by a beggar's extended hand.

If anybody may be immune to the melancholy of which his friend Mrs.
Falconer spoke, it should surely be this gentleman, smoking his cigar
before the fire. The unopened letters--there was a pile of them--would
have offered ample reason why. No one of the lot but bore some
testimony to the generous heart which, beneath dinner-jacket and behind
the screw-faced watch with the picture in the back of it, beat so
healthy and so well.

But the bestowal of benefits, whilst it may beautify the giver, does
not always transform itself into the one benefit desired and console
the bestower! Bulstrode had a charming home. He was alone in it. He
had his clubs where bachelors like himself, more or less infected with
Christmas gloom, would be glad to greet him. He had his friends, many
of them, and their home circles were complete. His, by force of
circumstances, began and ended with himself, and as if triumphant to
have found so tempting a victim, the gloom came and possessed Bulstrode
as he sat and mused.

But the decided sadness that stole across his face bore no relation, to
the season, to whose white mystery and holy beauty there was something
in his boyish, kindly heart that always responded.

The sadness Mrs. Falconer's letter awakened would not sleep. What his
Christmas _might_ be...! He had only to order his motor, to call for
her and drive over the ferry; to sit beside her in the train, to drive
with her again across the wintry roads. He had but to see her, watch
her, talk with her, share with her the day and evening, to have his
Christmas as nearly what a feast should be as dreams could ask. The
whole festival was there: joy, good-will--peace? No. Not peace for
him or for her--not that; everything else, but not that. And he had
been travelling for five weary months in order to make himself keep for
her that peace a little longer.

Bulstrode sighed here, lifte