He and Natalie lunched alone, Natalie in radiant good humor. His gift to her had been a high collar of small diamonds magnificently set, and Natalie, whose throat commenced to worry her, had welcomed it rapturously. Also, he had that morning notified Graham that his salary had been raised to five thousand dollars.
Graham had shown relief rather than pleasure.
“I daresay I won't earn it, Father,” he had said. “But I'll at east try to keep out of debt on it.”
“If you can't, better let me be your banker, Graham.”
The boy had flushed. Then he had disappeared, as usual, and Clayton and Natalie sat across from each other, in their high-armed lion chairs, and made a pretense of Christmas gayety. True to Natalie's sense of the fitness of things, a small Nuremberg Christmas tree, hung with tiny toys and lighted with small candles, stood in the center of the table.
“We are dining out,” she explained. “So I thought we'd use it now.”
“It's very pretty,” Clayton acknowledged. And he wondered if Natalie felt at all as he did, the vast room and the two men serving, with Graham no one knew where, and that travesty of Christmas joy between them. His mind wandered to long ago Christmases.
“It's not so very long since we had a real tree,” he observed. “Do you remember the one that fell and smashed all the things on it? And how Graham heard it and came down?”
“Horribly messy things,” said Natalie, and watched the second man critically. He was new, and she decided he was awkward.
She chattered through the meal, however, with that light gayety of hers which was not gayety at all, and always of the country house.