The sunset golden and gathering up its last gold threw it backward across the sadness of the Shield. One by one the stars came back to their faithful places above the silence and the whiteness. A swinging lamp was lighted on the front porch and its rays fell on little round mats of snow stamped off by entering boot heels. On each gatepost a low Christmas star was set to guide and welcome good neighbors; and between those beacons soon they came hurrying, fathers and mothers and children assembling for the party.
Late into the night the party lasted.
The logs blazed in deep fireplaces and their Forest Memories went to ashes. Bodily comfort there was and good-will and good wishes and the robust sensible making the best of what is best on the surface of our life. And hale eating and drinking as old England itself once ate and drank at Yuletide. And fast music and dancing that ever wanted to go faster than the music.
The chief feature of the revelry was the distribution of gifts on the Christmas Tree—the handing over to this person and to that person of those unread lessons of the ages—little mummied packages of the lord of time. One thing no one noted. Fresh candles had replaced those burnt out on the Tree the night before: all the candles were white now.
Revellers! Revellers! A crowded canvas! A brilliantly painted scene! Controlling everything, controlling herself, the lady of the house: hunting out her guests with some grace that befitted each; laughing and talking with the doctor; secretly giving most attention to the doctor’s wife—faded little sufferer; with strength in her to be the American wife and mother in the home of the poet’s dream: the spiritual majesty of her bridal veil still about her amid life’s snow as it never lifts itself from the face of the Jungfrau amid the sad most lovely mountains: the American wife and mother!—herself the Jungfrau among the world’s women!
The last thing before the company broke up took place what often takes place there in happy gatherings: the singing of the song of the State which is also a song of the Nation—its melody of the unfallen home: with sadness enough in it, God knows, but with sanctity: she seated at the piano—the others upholding her like a living bulwark.
There was another company thronging the rooms that no one wot of: those Bodiless Ones that often are much more real than the embodied—the Guests of the Imagination.
The Memories were there, strolling back and forth through the chambers arm and arm with the Years: bestowing no cognizance upon that present scene nor aware that they were not alone. About the Christmas Tree the Wraiths of earlier children returned to gambol; and these knew naught of those later ones who had strangely come out of the unknown to fill their places. Around the walls stood other majestical Veiled Shapes that bent undivided attention upon the actual pageant: these were Life’s Pities. Ever and anon they would lift their noble veils and look out upon that brief flicker of our mortal joy, and drop them and relapse into their compassionate vigil.
But of the Bodiless Ones there gathered a solitary young Shape filled the entire house with her presence. As the Memories walked through the rooms with the Years, they paused ever before her and mutely beckoned her to a place in their Sisterhood. The children who had wandered back peeped shyly at her but then with some sure instinct of recognition ran to her and threw down their gifts, to put their arms around her. And the Pities before they left the house that night walked past her one by one and each lifted its veil and dropped it more softly.
This was the Shape: