some charming country house
having a most katische (is that the way it is spelled,
probably not) time. But if by any chance you _are_ in town,
won't you make your playmate's shout to you from her back
yard a part of your Xmas? She feels shy about sending this
effusive greeting with all its characteristic sloppiness of
writing, but she does want you to have a welcome to Xmas
fun, & won't you please give the Touricar a pair of warm
little slippers from

RUTH GAYLORD WINSLOW.

P.S. Mrs. Tirrell has sent me an angel miniature Jap garden,
with a tiny pergola & real dwarf trees & a bridge that you
expect an Alfred Noyes lantern on, & Oh Carl, an issa
goldfish in a pool!

MISS R. WINSLOW.

"'----all the dear things I want'!" Carl repeated, standing tranced in
the hall, oblivious of the doctor-landlord snooping at the back. "Ruth
blessed, do you know the thing I want most?... Say! Great! I'll
hustle out and send her all the flowers in the world. Or, no. I've got
it." He was already out of the house, hastening toward the subway.
"I'll send her one of these lingerie tea-baskets with all kinds of
baby pots of preserves and tea-balls and stuff.... Wonder what
Dunleavy sent her?... Rats! I don't care. Jiminy! I'm happy! Me to
Palm Beach to fly? Not a chance!"

He had Christmas dinner in state, with the California Exiles Club. He
was craftily careless about the manner in which he touched a letter in
his pocket for gloves, which tailors have been inspired to put on the
left side of dress-clothes.

* * * * *

Twice Carl called at Ruth's in the two weeks after Christmas. Once she
declared that she was tired of modern life, that socialism and
agnosticism shocked her, that the world needed the courtly stiffness
of mid-Victorian days, as so ably depicted in the works of Mrs.
Florence Barclay--needed hair-cloth as a scourge for white
tango-dancing backs. As for her, Ruth announced, she was going to be
mid-Victorian just as soon as she could find a hair-locket, silk
mitts, and an elderly female tortoise-shell cat with an instinctive
sense of delicacy. She sat bolt-upright on the front of the most
impersonal French-gilt chair in the drawing-room and asserted that
Phil Dunleavy, with his safe ancestry of two generations of
wholesalers and strong probabilities about the respectability of still
another generation, was her ideal of a Christian ge