"I had to go to young Skidmore's instead," said a pale, spiteful-looking boy with fair hair, carefully parted in the middle. "It was like his cheek to ask me, but I thought I'd go, you know, just to see what it was like."
"What was it like?" asked one or two near him, languidly.
"Oh, awfully slow! They've a poky little house in Brompton somewhere, and there was no dancing, only boshy games and a conjuror, without any presents. And, oh! I say, at supper there was a big cake on the table, and no one was allowed to cut it, because it was hired. They're so poor, you know. Skidmore's pater is only a clerk, and you should see his sisters!"
All my sympathies are with Skidmore, and I think that the fair-haired boy was an unmitigated beast, and cad, and snob. But there is an awful verisimilitude about "Boshy Games and a Conjuror," and I bless the fate which allowed me to grow up in ignorance of Christmas Parties.
XXXVII
NEW YEAR'S DAY
On the 1st of January 1882, Matthew Arnold wrote to his sister: "I think the beginning of a New Year very animating—it is so visible an occasion for breaking off bad habits and carrying into effect good resolutions." This was splendid in a man who had just entered his sixtieth year, and we all should like to share the sentiment; but it is not always easy to feel "animated," even by the most significant anniversaries. Sometimes they only depress; and the effect which they produce depends so very largely on the physical condition in which they find us. Suppose, for instance, that one is a fox-hunter, in the prime of life and the pride of health, with a good string of horses which have been eating their heads off during a prolonged frost. As one wakes on New Year's morning, one hears a delicious dripping from the roof, and one's servant, coming in with tea and letters, announces a rapid thaw. Then "the beginning of a New Year" is "animating" enough; and, while we wash and shave, we pledge ourselves, like Matthew Arnold, to "break off bad habits and carry into effect good resolutions." We remember with shame that we missed three capital days' hunting last November because we let our friends seduce us to their shooting-parties; and we resolve this year to make up for lost time, to redeem wasted opportunities, and not willingly to lose a day between this and Christmas. Such resolutions are truly "animating"; but we cannot all be young or healthy or fox-hunters, and then the anniversary takes a different colour. Perhaps one is cowering over one's study-fire, with "an air of romance struggling through the commonplace effect of a swelled face" (like Miss Hucklebuckle in "The Owlet"), or mumbling the minced remains of our Christmas turkey as painfully as Father Diggory in "Ivanhoe," who was "so severely afflicted by toothache that he could only eat on one side of his face." Not for us, in such circumstances, are "animating" visions of wide pastures, and negotiable fences, and too-fresh hunters pulling one's arms off, and the chime of the "dappled darlings down the roaring blast." Rather does our New Year's fancy lightly turn to thoughts of dentistry and doctoring. We ask ourselves whether the time has not come when art must replace what nature has withdrawn; and, if we form a resolution, it is nothing more heroic than that we will henceforward wear goloshes in damp weather and a quilted overcoat in frost.