TO SPRINGVALE FOR CHRISTMAS[7]
Her children arise up and call her blessed.
Zona Gale
When President Arthur Tilton of Briarcliff College, who usually used a two-cent stamp, said “Get me Chicago, please,” his secretary was impressed, looked for vast educational problems to be in the making, and heard instead:
“Ed? Well, Ed, you and Rick and Grace and I are going out to Springvale for Christmas.... Yes, well, I’ve got a family too, you recall. But mother was seventy last Fall and—Do you realize that it’s eleven years since we’ve all spent Christmas with her? Grace has been every year. She’s going this year. And so are we! And take her the best Christmas she ever had, too. Ed, mother was seventy last Fall——”
At dinner, he asked his wife what would be a suitable gift, a very special gift, for a woman of seventy. And she said: “Oh, your mother. Well, dear, I should think the material for a good wool dress would be right. I’ll select it for you, if you like—” He said that he would see, and he did not reopen the subject.
In town on December twenty-fourth he timed his arrival to allow him an hour in a shop. There he bought a silver-gray silk of a fineness and a lightness which pleased him and at a price which made him comfortably guilty. And at the shop, Ed, who was Edward McKillop Tilton, head of a law firm, picked him up.
“Where’s your present?” Arthur demanded.
Edward drew a case from his pocket and showed him a tiny gold wrist-watch of decent manufacture and explained: “I expect you’ll think I’m a fool, but you know that mother has told time for fifty years by the kitchen clock, or else the shield of the black-marble parlor angel who never goes—you get the idea?—and so I bought her this.”
At the station was Grace, and the boy who bore her bag bore also a parcel of great dimensions.