tting ready? The officers here say we
can't expand an army to get enough men without a draft law. Can you see
the administration endangering the next election with a draft law? Not
on your life.

"I'm on the wagon, Clay. Honestly, it's funny. I don't mind telling you
I'm darned miserable sometimes. But then I get busy, and I'm so blooming
glad in a rush to get water that doesn't smell to heaven that I don't
want anything else.

"I suppose they'll give us a good hate on Christmas. Well, think of me
sometimes when you sit down to dinner, and you might drink to our coming
in. If we have a principle to divide among us we shall have to."

Clayton read the letter twice.

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.

"The dining-room floor is to be oak, with a marble border," she said.
"You remember the ones we saw in Italy? And the ceiling is blue and
gold.