leave there.  But o’ course she couldn’t afford to buy those kind of things for herself now when she’s got to remember all her dear friends, and she runs on and on and the old batch growls, ‘Stung again!’ and goes to Strouther and Streckfuss’s and tells Mr. Streckfuss to send Mrs. Budlong that blamed bronze clock she was admiring.  And that’s how she gets things.  I could do it myself if I’d a mind to.”

Mr. Detwiller felt that there was more envy than truth in this last remark, and he was rash enough to speak up for justice:  “You could if you’d a mind to?  Yep.  If you’d a mind to!  That’s what somebody said about Shakespeare’s plays.  ’I could a wrote ’em myself if I’d a mind to,’ says he, and somebody else said, ‘Yes, if you’d a mind to,’ he says.  And that’s about it.  Any body could do what Mizzes Budlong does if they had the mind to; but the thing is, she’s got the mind to.  She goes after the gifts—­and gits ’em.  She don’t almost git ‘em, and she ain’t goin’ to git ’em.  She gits ’em.  And what gits me is how she gits ’em.”

“Roscoe Detwiller, if you’re goin’ to praise that woman in the presence of your own lawful wife, I’ll never speak to you the longest day I live.”  “Who’s praisin’ her?  I was just sayin’—­”

“Why, Roscoe Detwiller, you did, too!  And I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself.”

“Say, what ails you?  Why, I was roastin’ her to beat the band.”

“And to think that on Christmas day of all days I should live to hear my own husband that I’ve loved and cherished and worked my fingers to the bone and never got any thanks and other women keepin’ two and three hired girls, and after him denyin’ his own children things to get expensive presents for a shameless creature like that Budlong woman—­”

All over Carthage on Christmas afternoons couples were similarly at loggerheads over Mrs. Budlong’s annual triumph.

Now of course Mrs. Budlong did not get all those presents without giving presents.  Not in Carthage!  It might have been possible to bamboozle these people one Christmas, but never another.  Mrs. Budlong gave heaps of presents.  Christmas was an industry with her, an ambition; Christmas was her career.  It had long ago lost its religious significance for her, as for nearly everybody else in Carthage.  Even Mr. Frankenstein (the Pantatorium magnate) is one of the most ardent advertisers of Christmas bargains, while Isidore Strouther and Esau Streckfuss are “almost persuaded” every December.  They might be entirely persuaded if it were not for the scenes they witness in their aisles during the last weeks of Yuletide and the aftermath of trying to collect from the Gentile husbands during Billtide.

Mrs. Budlong’s Christmas presents were of two sorts:  those she made herself and those she made her husband pay for.  He was the typical husband who never fails to settle his wife’s bills, so long as he may raise a row about them till his wife cries and looks like an expensive luxury which only a really successful man could afford.  Then he subsides until the first of the next month.