Agnes Sligh Turnbull
On the outside—that is, in the smart little suburban town of Branchbrook—Christmas week had begun most auspiciously. A light fall of snow made the whole place look like an old-fashioned holiday greeting card; the neat English stuccos and Colonial clapboards set back in wide lawns, seemed to gather their flocks of clipped little pine and spruce shrubbery closer to them and suggest through their fresh curtained windows the thought of bright wood fires and mistletoe and shining Christmas cheer soon to come.
In the parish room of St. Andrew’s small gray stone church the children were practicing carols while pigeons cooed on the roof. And down in the village center great boxes of holly wreaths stood in the street before all the grocery store windows, and bevies of slender little virgin pine trees, ready and waiting for the great moment to which they had been born, leaned against all the shop door-ways.
The postman smiled beneath his staggering load, thinking of later benefactions; and the windows of Beverly’s Fine Food Stuffs, the town’s most exclusive market, were caparisoned with every delicacy which even a Christmas epicure might desire.
Strangers spoke to each other, children laughed gleefully, shop men made jokes with their customers, everybody was busy, friendly, somehow relaxed from the ordinary conventional aloofness, because Christmas was only five days away. Everything was just as it should be, on the outside.
But on the inside—that is to say, in the big Colonial home of the Bartons which had been built just long enough before prices went up to make it seem now more of an abode of wealth than it really was—here the week had begun in the worst way possible. Monday morning had started with a quarrel.
Alice Barton had not rested well the night before. She had fully planned to spend all Sunday afternoon and evening addressing Christmas cards. That would have seen them all safely in the postman’s hands this morning.
But the plan had been frustrated by the Levitts’ dropping in for a call, staying to tea and spending the evening. And it had been Tom’s fault entirely. He was the one that simply kept them. Of course she had to be decently polite. They sat listening to the radio until eleven. After that she had been too tired to start the cards. And here they were all to do now, this morning, more than a hundred of them, on top of all the regular day’s work and the committee meeting at eleven. And she must get a few more hours shopping in! That would be hectic now but there was no help for it. And all her packages were yet to be tied up, and Mrs. Dunlop’s bridge-luncheon on Wednesday and Catherine’s friend coming Thursday! She must not forget about the guest room curtains! Why had she let Catherine have any one come at Christmas time!
The dull headache she had when she rose became a splitting pain. She scarcely spoke to Tom as she dressed except for one brief and fitting retort to his: “Now don’t spend all day in the bath room. I have to shave!”
She went down stairs, mechanically checking off the things she must tell Delia, the maid.