Alice’s face darkened too. “Well, what are you going to do about it? You know the kind everybody sends us. We can’t look like pikers. It would have cost fifty dollars to get the engraved kind I wanted. I won’t send out cheap stereotyped ones, so all that’s left for me is to try to pick out something artistic and individual, at least for the people we care most about. It’s no easy job, and this is the thanks I get!”
“You bet you’ll get none from me. Do you know how I feel? I hate Christmas! Nothing but money, money beforehand, and nothing but bills, bills, bills afterward. It’s enough to drive a man crazy. And what’s the sense of it? You send a lot of cards to people that barely look at ’em and throw ’em in the fire! You women exchange a bunch of junk that you never use. And as a family, we spend money like drunken sailors on a lot of extravagant things we’ve no business having. And old Dad, poor boob, gets a good dinner out of it and then he pays and pays and pays for the next six months! That’s the way I’ve got it doped out!”
Alice’s face was frozen in sharp lines. “If that’s the way you feel about it I suppose I needn’t hope for my coat.”
“Coat! What coat?”
“Tom, as if you didn’t know perfectly well what I wanted this year more than anything. The short fur coat! Why I’ve talked about it all fall. I think every woman in town has one but me. I can’t wear my big seal one shopping and marketing! And my cloth one is simply gone! Why, I thought all the time you knew, and that you’d surely....” There were almost tears in her voice.
“So it’s come to that, has it! A woman has to have a special kind of fur coat to do her marketing in! Too bad! Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you but you can’t bank on one this year—unless you’d like to mortgage the house!”
He got up abruptly from the table. Young Tom and Catherine had just come into the dining room in time for the last speech. They looked at their parents with cool, amused eyes. It was not the first quarrel they had witnessed in the last years since they had left childhood behind. Catherine, a day pupil at Miss Bossart’s finishing school, and young Tom, a Senior in High School, were startlingly mature. They were calmer, more cynical, more unemotional than their parents. They touched life with knowing fingers that never trembled. Alice marveled at them.
She rose now too and followed Tom into the library. He sat down a moment at the desk and then flicked her a slip of paper.
“There’s fifty. And that’s all, remember, until next month’s allowance!”
Alice’s voice was like cold steel. “Thanks. I’m sure I’ll enjoy spending it since it’s so very generously given.”