Christopher Wellwyn, an artist, a man deeply in sympathy with all human sorrow and failings, generously shares his meager means with everyone who applies to him for help.
His daughter Ann is of a more practical turn of mind. She cannot understand that giving is as natural and necessary to her father as light and air; indeed, the greatest joy in life.
Perhaps Ann is actuated by anxiety for her father who is so utterly "hopeless" that he would give away his "last pair of trousers." From her point of view "people who beg are rotters": decent folk would not stoop to begging. But Christopher Wellwyn's heart is too full of humanity to admit of such a straight-laced attitude. "We're not all the same.... One likes to be friendly. What's the use of being alive if one isn't?"
Unfortunately most people are not alive to the tragedies around them. They are often unthinking mechanisms, mere tabulating machines, like Alfred Calway, the Professor, who believes that "we're to give the State all we can spare, to make the undeserving deserving." Or as Sir Hoxton, the Justice of the Peace, who insists that "we ought to support private organizations for helping the deserving, and damn the undeserving." Finally there is the Canon who religiously seeks the middle road and "wants a little of both."
When Ann concludes that her father is the despair of all social reformers, she is but expressing a great truism; namely, that social reform is a cold and bloodless thing that can find no place in the glowing humanity of Christopher Wellwyn.
It is Christmas Eve, the birth of Him who came to proclaim "Peace on earth, good will to all." Christopher Wellwyn is about to retire when he is disturbed by a knock on the door.
The snow-covered, frost-pinched figure of Guinevere Megan appears. She is a flower-seller to whom Wellwyn had once given his card that she might find him in case of need. She comes to him when the rest of the world has passed her by, forlorn and almost as dead as her violets which no one cares to buy.
At sight of her misery Wellwyn forgets his daughter's practical admonition and his promise to her not to be "a fool." He treats the flower-seller tenderly, makes her warm and comfortable. He has barely time to show Guinevere into his model's room, when another knock is heard. This time it is Ferrand, "an alien," a globe trotter without means,—a tramp whom Wellwyn had once met in the Champs-Elysées. Without food for days and unable to endure the cold, Ferrand too comes to the artist.
Ferrand. If I had not found you, Monsieur—I would have been a little hole in the river to-night—I was so discouraged.... And to think that in a few minutes He will be born!... The world would reproach you for your goodness to me. Monsieur, if He himself were on earth now, there would be a little heap of gentlemen writing to the journals every day to call him sloppee sentimentalist! And what is veree funny, these gentlemen they would all be most strong Christians. But that will not trouble you. Monsieur; I saw well from the first that you are no Christian. You have so kind a face.