V

THE BITER BIT

First, Mrs. Budlong felt amazement that she could have so ignored the very focus of her former ambition.  Then she felt shame at her unpreparedness.  She caught the evening paper out of her husband’s lap to find the date.  November ninth and not a Christmas thing begun.  Yet a few days and the news-stands would have apprised her that Christmas was coming, for by the middle of November all the magazines put on their holly and their chromos of the three Magi and their Santa Clauses, as women put on summer straw hats at Easter.

Mrs. Budlong’s hands sought and wrung each other as if in mutual reproach.  They had been pouring tea and passing wafers when they should have been Dorcassing at their Christmas tasks.  It had been left for her husband of all people to warn her that her own special Bacchanal was imminent.

If he had been a day later, the neighbors would have anticipated him as well as the magazines.  The Christmas idea seemed to strike the whole town at once.  Mrs. Budlong became the victim of her own classic device of pretending to let slip a secret.  The townswomen shamelessly turned her own formula against her.

Mrs. Detwiller met her at church and said: 

“Yesterday morning at eleven I had the most curious presentiment, my dear.  I remember the hour so exactly because I’ve been making it a rule to begin work on your Christmas present every morning at—­ Oh, but I didn’t inTend to let you know.  No, dearie, I won’t tell you what it is.  But I can’t help believing it’s Just what you’ll need in New York.”

Myra Eppley, with whom Mrs. Budlong had never exchanged Christmas presents, at all, but with whom an intimacy had sprung up since Mrs. Budlong came into the reputation of her money—­Myra Eppley had the effrontery to call up on the telephone and say: 

“Would you mind telling me, my dear, the shade of wall paper you’re going to have in your New York parlor, because I’m making you the daintiest little—­well, no matter, but will you tell me?”

Poor Mrs. Budlong almost swooned from the telephone.  She did not know what the color of her wall paper would be in New York.  She did not know that she would ever have wall paper in New York.  She only knew that Myra Eppley, too, was calling her “my dear.”  Myra Eppley also was going to give her a Christmas present.  And would have to be given one.

Mrs. Budlong had received fair warning, but she felt about as grateful as a wayfarer feels to the rattlesnake that whizzes “Make r-r-r-ready for the corrroner-r-r.”

Next, young Mrs. Chur (Editha Cinnamon as was, for she had finally landed Mr. Chur in spite of the accident—­or because of it) called up to say: 

“Oh, my dear, my husband wants to know what brand of cigars your husband smokes; and would you tell me, dearie—­it’s rather personal, but—­what size bath-slippers you wear?”