“At home?” asked Beth, flushing. “Well, there aren’t any big stores in town. Some people send to Boston for their presents; lots of people buy from catalogues. Of course we have a Sunday-school celebration. Aunt Rebecca mostly gives me sensible things, things I’d have to have some time. Janie and I----” Beth stopped. She found it hard to describe the little gifts that she and Janie made each other with those long lists lying under her eyes upon her cousins’ knees. For the first time since she had really known them, she felt half afraid of Natalie and Alys. “Janie and you got each other some nice little thing that you each knew the other wanted, or else made something,” Natalie said, with her mother’s tactful kindness. “That’s the best way to keep Christmas, but you can’t help doing as Romans do when you’re in Rome. Did you decide on everything you were going to get, Beth?” Beth shook her head. “There aren’t many people I know,” she said, holding up a sheet of paper. “Janie and Daisy and Nell and Edith and May and Ruth--that’s all the girls. I’m going to subscribe for magazines for Aunt Rebecca; she’s crazy to read and she has used up ’most everything in the Public Library. I put down some sensible things for some people who haven’t any money. And I’m going to buy a lovely rose pink dress for Miriam Gaines. She’s a cripple from scarlet fever, but she’s young and I’m pretty sure she’d love a pink dress. People will all ask her why I ever in this world got her that, why I didn’t buy her a dark wrapper that would be useful. But I’m going to get a sort of dancing dress, ready made, as rose colored as it can be, and I sort of know Miriam will have a fit over it. I believe she’ll think she’s going to get well, else such a dress wouldn’t come for her; I can see her just living on it! And on Fourth of July, or days like that, I guess she’ll get her mother to put it on her. I think Christmas presents ought to be lovely, useless things that make you think things like fairy tales, even if they never come true. It seems to match Santa Claus stories better than sensible things do. Maybe they are useful things, if they make people happy.” “Where could you have learned such heart wisdom, my Beth?” asked Mrs. Cortlandt. She had come in quietly behind Beth and her voice close beside her chair made the little girl jump. “That’s the trouble with this campaign for useful Christmas gifts; people test usefulness by the sense of touch. If you three lassies are ready, we’ll go shopping.” “We’ll never be ready, mama,” sighed Alys. “We may as well start out and get what we know we want; it will take nearly every day from now on, anyway.” Beth’s eyes dilated, then she looked a little cast down. “It wouldn’t take long to get my things, but I’d be glad to have them in the house a while to gloat over them,” she said. Mrs. Cortlandt laughed, as she always laughed at Beth’s funny seriousness.