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“A hundred-dollar bill!” said my father. Every time he said it he seemed madder.

“And yet,” said my mother, “if what you say about his father’s sugar plantations is correct, a hundred-dollar bill probably didn’t look any larger to him than a–than a two-dollar bill looks to us–this year. We’ll simply return it to him very politely–as soon as we know his address. He was going West somewhere, wasn’t he? We shall hear, I suppose.”

“Hear nothing!” said my father. “I won’t have it! Did you see how he stared at Rosalee? It was outrageous! Absolutely outrageous! And Rosalee? I was ashamed of Rosalee! Positively ashamed!”

“But you see–it was really the first young man that Rosalee has ever had a chance to observe,” said my mother. “If you had ever been willing to let boys come to the house–maybe she wouldn’t have considered this one such a–such a thrilling curiosity.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” said my father. “She’s only a child! There’ll be no boys come to this house for years and years!”

“She’s seventeen,” said my mother. “You and I were married when I was seventeen.”

“That’s different!” said my father. He tried to smile. He couldn’t. Mother smiled quite a good deal. He jumped up and began to pace the room. He demanded things. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “that you want your daughter to marry this strange young man?”

“Not at all,” said mother.

Father turned at the edge of the rug and looked back. His face was all frowned. “And I don’t like him anyway,” he said. “He’s too dark!”

“His father roomed with you at college, you say?” asked my mother very softly. “Do you remember him–specially?”

“Do I remember him?” cried my father. He looked astonished. “Do I remember him? Why, he was the best friend I ever had in the world! Do I remember him?”

“And he was–very fair?” asked my mother.

“Fair?” cried my father. “He was as dark as a Spaniard!”

“And yet–reasonably–respectable?” asked my mother.

“Respectable?” cried my father. “Why, he was the highest-minded man I ever knew in my life!”

“And so–dark?” said my mother. She began to laugh. It was what we call her cut-finger laugh, her bandage laugh. It rolled all around father’s angriness and made it feel better almost at once.

“Well, I can’t help it,” said father. He shook his head just the way Carol does sometimes when he’s planning to be pleasant as soon as it’s convenient. “Well, I can’t help it! Exceptions, of course, are exceptions! But Cuba? A climate all mushy with warmth and sunshine! What possible stamina can a young man have who’s grown up on sugar-cane sirup and–and bananas?”

“He seemed to have teeth,” said my mother. “He ate two helpings of turkey!”

“He had a gold cigaret-case!” said my father. “Gold!”

My mother began to laugh all over again.

“Maybe his Sunday-school class gave it to him,” she said. It seemed to be a joke. Once father’s Sunday-school class gave him a high silk hat. Father laughed a little.

Mother looked very beautiful. She ruffled her hair a little on father’s shoulder. She pinked her cheeks from the inside some way. She glanced up at the topmost branch of the Christmas tree. The gold bud showed quite plainly.

“I–I wonder–what he wished,” she said. “We’ll have to look–some time.”

I made a little creak in my bones. I didn’t mean to. My father and mother both turned round. They started to explore!

I ran like everything!

I think it was very kind of God to make December have the very shortest days in the year!

Summer, of course, is nice! The long, sunny light! Lying awake till ‘most nine o’clock every night to hear the blackness come rustling! Such a lot of early mornings everywhere and birds singing! Sizzling-hot noons with cool milk to drink! The pleasant nap before it’s time to play again!

But if December should feel long, what would children do? About Christmas, I mean! Even the best way you look at it, Christmas is always the furthest-off day that I ever heard about!