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On the day before Christmas eve John Sedyard closed his desk, dismissed his two clerks and his stenographer two hours earlier than usual, and set out in quest of adventure and a present for his sister Edith. John Sedyard had a habit of succeeding in all he set forth to do but the complete and surprising success which attended him in this quest was a notch above even his high average.

Earlier in the month, his stenographer had secured the annual pledges of his affection for all the relatives, friends and dependants to whom he was in the habit of giving presents: all except his mother, his unmarried sister, Edith, who still lived at home, and his fiancee, Mary Van Plank. The gifts for these three, he had decided, must be of his own choice and purchase. He had provided for his mother and for Mary earlier in the week. Neither excitement nor adventure had attended upon the purchase of their gifts. Something for the house or the table was always the trick for elderly ladies who presided over large establishments and gave their whole souls to the managing of them. He bought for his mother a set of colonial silver candlesticks. For Mary, he bought a comb of gold–all gold, like her own lovely hair. The dark tortoise shell of the one she wore always seemed an incongruous note in her fair crown. But Edith was as yet unpresented, and it was on her account that Mr. Sedyard deserted his office and delighted his subordinates at three o’clock in the afternoon.

Edith was much more difficult than the other two had been. She was strong-minded, much given to churchwork and committees. Neither the home, as represented by the candlesticks, nor self-adornment as typified by the golden comb could be expected to appeal to her communistic, altruistic nature. And Sedyard, having experienced two inspirations, could think of nothing but combs and candlesticks. So he threw himself into the current, which swept along Broadway, trusting that some accident would suggest a suitable offering. Meanwhile, he revelled in the crowd, good-humored, holiday-making, holly-decked, which carried him uptown, past Wanamaker’s and Grace Church, swirled him across old “dead man’s curve,” and down the Fourteenth Street side of Union Square. Here the shops were smaller, not so overwhelming, and here he was stopped by seeing a red auction flag. Looking in over the heads of the assembled crowd, he saw that the auctioneer was holding up a feather-crowned hat and addressing his audience after the manner of his kind:

“Buy a hat for your wife. A waste-paper basket by night and a hat by day. Genuine ostrich feathers growing on it. Becoming to all styles of feminine beauty. What am I bid on this sure tickler of the feminine palate? Three dollars? Why, ladies and gents, the dooty on it alone was twelve. It’s a Paris hat, ladies. Your sister, your mother, your maiden aunt–“

Sedyard hearkened, but absently, to the fellow’s words, but his problem was solved. He would buy Edith something to look pretty in. She was a pretty girl and in danger of forgetting it. And she had been decent, John reflected, awfully decent about Mary. He knew that the entente cordiale which existed between Mary and his mother was largely due to Edith, and he knew, too, that Edith, an authority on modern-housing and model-living, surely but silently disapproved of Mary’s living alone in a three-roomed studio and devoting her days to painting, when there was so much rescue work to be done in the world.

“I get my uplift,” Mary would explain when Edith urged these things upon her, “from the elevator. Living on the eighth floor, dear, I cannot but help seeing the world from a very different angle.”

Yes, John reflected as he chuckled in retrospect over such conversations, Edith had certainly been awfully decent.