left them unusually far behind; “my birthday comes the day before, so we are both on the lookout for something to give each other.”
“Ah,” said Bertram. “Now, perhaps you can advise me on that very point. I want to give Suzanne something, and I haven’t the least idea what she wants.”
“She’s rather a problem,” said Eleanor. “She seems to have everything one can think of, lucky girl. A fan is always useful; she’ll be going to a lot of dances at Davos this winter. Yes, I should think a fan would please her more than anything. After our birthdays are over we inspect each other’s muster of presents, and I always feel dreadfully humble. She gets such nice things, and I never have anything worth showing. You see, none of my relations or any of the people who give me presents are at all well off, so I can’t expect them to do anything more than just remember the day with some little trifle. Two years ago an uncle on my mother’s side of the family, who had come into a small legacy, promised me a silver-fox stole for my birthday. I can’t tell you how excited I was about it, how I pictured myself showing it off to all my friends and enemies. Then just at that moment his wife died, and, of course, poor man, he could not be expected to think of birthday presents at such a time. He has lived abroad ever since, and I never got my fur. Do you know, to this day I can scarcely look at a silver-fox pelt in a shop window or round anyone’s neck without feeling ready to burst into tears. I suppose if I hadn’t had the prospect of getting one I shouldn’t feel that way. Look, there is the fan counter, on your left; you can easily slip away in the crowd. Get her as nice a one as you can see—she is such a dear, dear girl.”
“Hullo, I thought I had lost you,” said Suzanne, making her way through an obstructive knot of shoppers. “Where is Bertram?”
“I got separated from him long ago. I thought he was on ahead with you,” said Eleanor. “We shall never find him in this crush.”
Which turned out to be a true prediction.
“All our trouble and forethought thrown away,” said Suzanne sulkily, when they had pushed their way fruitlessly through half a dozen departments.
“I can’t think why you didn’t grab him by the arm,” said Eleanor; “I would have if I’d known him longer, but I’d only just been introduced. It’s nearly four now, we’d better have tea.”
Some days later Suzanne rang Eleanor up on the telephone.
“Thank you very much for the photograph frame. It was just what I wanted. Very good of you. I say, do you know what that Kneyght person has given me? Just what you said he would—a wretched fan. What? Oh yes, quite a good enough fan in its way, but still …”
“You must come and see what he’s given me,” came in Eleanor’s voice over the phone.
“You! Why should he give you anything?”
“Your cousin appears to be one of those rare people of wealth who take a pleasure in giving good presents,” came the reply.
“I wondered why he was so anxious to know where she lived,” snapped Suzanne to herself as she rang off.
A cloud has arisen between the friendships of the two young women; as far as Eleanor is concerned the cloud has a silver-fox lining.
The Lumber Room
The children were to be driven, as a special treat, to the sands at Jagborough. Nicholas was not to be of the party; he was in disgrace. Only that morning he had refused to eat his wholesome bread-and-milk on the seemingly frivolous ground that there was a frog in it. Older and wiser and better people had told him that there could not possibly be a frog in his bread-and-milk and that he was not to talk nonsense; he continued, nevertheless, to talk what seemed the veriest nonsense, and described with much detail the colouration and markings of the alleged frog. The dramatic part of the incident was that there really was a frog in Nicholas’ basin of bread-and-milk; he had put it there himself, so he felt entitled to know something about it. The sin of taking a frog from the garden and putting it into a bowl of wholesome bread-and-milk was enlarged on at great length, but the fact that stood out clearest in the whole affair, as it presented itself to the mind of Nicholas, was that the older, wiser, and better people had been proved to be profoundly in error in matters about which they had expressed the utmost assurance.
“You said there couldn’t possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk,” he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favourable ground.
So his boy-cousin and girl-cousin and his quite uninteresting younger brother were to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to stay at home. His cousins’ aunt, who insisted, by an unwarranted stretch of imagination, in styling herself his aunt also, had hastily invented the Jagborough expedition in order to impress on Nicholas the delights that he had justly forfeited by his disgraceful conduct at the breakfast-table. It was her habit, whenever one of the children fell from grace, to improvise something of a festival nature from which the offender would be rigorously debarred; if all the children sinned collectively they were suddenly informed of a circus in a neighbouring town, a circus of unrivalled merit and uncounted elephants, to which, but for their depravity, they would have been taken that very day.
A few decent tears were looked for on the part of Nicholas when the moment for the departure of the expedition arrived. As a matter of fact, however, all the crying was done by his girl-cousin, who scraped her knee
