"It's never seemed the same since I knew she was engaged," Mary thought with a sigh. "Of course I know she's just as fond of me as she was before, but I can't help feeling that she's so taken up with other things now, her life so heavenly full since she has found her prince, that she can't take the same interest in my affairs."
As she passed the mirror she turned back for a second glance. The first had shown her the fresh unlined face of a girl of seventeen, but judging by the way she felt she was sure there should be wrinkles. The weight of world-weariness and disillusionment and foreboding which depressed her, certainly could not belong to youth. They must be the property of an old woman, in her sixties at least.
CHAPTER VII
CHRISTMAS
Ten days before Christmas Mary opened the bottom drawer of her bureau, in which she had placed each gift as soon as it was finished, and sitting down on the floor beside it, proceeded to take an inventory of the packages within. They were all wrapped, stamped and addressed, but she had made them ready without a single Christmas thrill. There was nothing in the climate or surroundings to suggest the holiday season, and she compared this year's preparations with the year before at Warwick Hall, when the very air seemed charged with a spirit of delightful expectancy; when everybody had secrets and went around smiling and humming snatches of carols which the choir-girls were practising for the service in the chapel.
Mechanically she counted the bundles and checked them off her list: the ones for Holland, for Joyce, for Eugenia, the bunny doll with the chamois skin head which she had made for little Patricia. She was very well satisfied with them all, as well as with the fancy trifles she had made for Lloyd and Betty and the girls at school, with whom she still kept up a correspondence. They were inexpensive, but they were original and appropriate.
Allowing for the crowded condition of the mails, she decided that the packages which had the longest distance to go should be started that very day. These she took from the drawer and piled on her bed, and then got out her pen to begin the writing of her Christmas letters.
Now one may make all sorts of dainty gifts, and tie them with holly ribbon, and send them away in Christmasy looking packages which will bring a glow to the heart of the one who opens them, and yet do it all without one spark of festal feeling herself. But it is impossible to write a Christmas letter and put the proper zest into its greetings, unless one is a-tingle with it. When Mary discovered that fact, she tore up the sheets on which she had made various beginnings, and put the cork in her ink-bottle.