"Like yourself?" I smiled.

"My!" she cried. "How can you say such a thing?"

And really I was sorry I had said it. It seemed so like twitting a
person on facts, when I came to think about it.

THE UTILITARIAN MR. CARRAWAY

The Christmas season was approaching, and Mr. Carraway, who had lately
become something of a philosopher, began to think about gifts for his
wife and children. The more he thought of them, the more firmly was he
convinced that there was something radically wrong with the system of
giving that had prevailed in past years. He conjured up visions of the
useless things he had given and received on previous occasions, and an
inventory of his personal receipts at the four celebrations leading up
to the present disclosed the fact that he was long on match-boxes,
cigar-cases, and smoking-jackets, the last every one of them too small,
with an appalling supply of knitted and crocheted objects, the gifts of
his children, in reserve. His boot-closet was a perfect revelation of
the misdirected Christmas energies of the young, disclosing, as it
always did upon occasions when he was in a great hurry, a half-dozen
pairs of worsted slippers, which he had received at Yuletide, some of
them adorned with stags of beads leaping over zephyr walls, and others
made in the image of cats of extraordinary color, with yellow glass eyes
set in directly over the toe whereon he kept his favorite corn. I am not
sure that it was not the stepping of an awkward visitor upon one of
these same glass eyes, while these slippers for the first time covered
his feet, that set Mr. Carraway to cogitating upon the hollowness of
"Christmas as She is Celebrated." Indeed, it is my impression that at
the very moment when that bit of adornment was pressed down upon Mr.
Carraway's corn he announced rather forcibly his disbelief in the
utility of any such infernal Christmas present as that. And as time went
on, and that offending, staring slipper slipped into his hand every time
he searched the closet in the dark for a left patent-leather pump, or
some other missing bit of foot-gear, the conviction grew upon him that
of the great reforms of which the world stood in crying need, the
reformation of the Christmas gift was possibly the most important.

The idea grew to be a mania with him, and he gradually developed into a
utilitarian of the most pronounced type. Nothing in the world so suited
him as an object, homely or otherwise, that coul