oudoir when she is
expecting the newspaper reporters. I reveled in the glowing fragrance
of the blossoms and felt very eastern and luxurious and popular. It had
been a busy, happy, work-filled week, in which I had had to snatch odd
moments for the selecting of certain wonderful toys for the Spalpeens.
There had been dolls and doll-clothes and a marvelous miniature kitchen
for the practical and stolid Sheila, and ingenious bits of mechanism
that did unbelievable things when wound up, for the clever, imaginative
Hans. I was not to have the joy of seeing their wide-eyed delight, but
I knew that there would follow certain laboriously scrawled letters,
filled with topsy-turvy capitals and crazily leaning words of thanks to
the doting old auntie who had been such good fun the summer before.

Boarding-house Christmases had become an old story. I had learned to
accept them, even to those obscure and foreign parts of turkey which
are seen only on boarding-house plates, and which would be recognized
nowhere else as belonging to that stately bird.

Christmas at Knapf's had been a happy surprise; a day of hearty good
cheer and kindness. There had even been a Christmas tree, hung with
stodgy German angels and Pfeffernuesse and pink-frosted cakes. I found
myself the bewildered recipient of gifts from everyone--from the Knapfs,
and the aborigines and even from one of the crushed-looking wives.
The aborigine whom they called Fritz had presented me with a huge and
imposing Lebkuchen, reposing in a box with frilled border, ornamented
with quaint little red-and-green German figures in sugar, and labeled
Nurnberg in stout letters, for it had come all the way from that
kuchen-famous city. The Lebkuchen I placed on my mantel shelf as
befitted so magnificent a work of art. It was quite too elaborate and
imposing to be sent the way of ordinary food, although it had a certain
tantalizingly spicy scent that tempted one to break off a corner here
and there.

On the afternoon of Christmas day I sat down to thank Dr. von Gerhard
for the flowers as prettily as might be. Also I asked his pardon, a
thing not hard to do with the perfume of his roses filling the room.

"For you," I wrote, "who are so wise in the ways of those tricky things
called nerves, must know that it was only a mild hysteria that made me
say those most unladylike things. I have written Norah all about it.
She has replied, advising me to stick to the good-fellow role but not to