_Mrs. Fountain_, catching it from him, and hiding her face in it on the table: "You ought to help me bear up, and instead of that you fling yourself on my sympathies and break me down." Lifting her face: "And if it was all a fake, as you say, and an illusion, what would you do, what would you give people in place of it?" _Fountain_: "I don't know." _Mrs. Fountain_: "What would you have in place of Christmas itself?" _Fountain_: "I don't know." _Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, then, I wouldn't set myself up to preach down everything--in a blue bath-gown. You've no idea how ridiculous you are." _Fountain_: "Oh, yes, I have. I can see you. You look like one of those blue nuns in Rome. But I don't remember any lace on them." _Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, you don't look like a blue monk, you needn't flatter yourself, for there are none. You look like-- What are you thinking about?" _Fountain_: "Oh, nothing. What do you suppose is in all these packages here? Useful things, that we need, that we must have? You know without looking that it's the superfluity of naughtiness in one form or other. And the givers of these gifts, they _had_ to give them, just as we've had to give dozens of gifts ourselves. We ought to have put on our cards, 'With the season's bitterest grudges,' 'In hopes of a return,' 'With a hopeless sense of the folly,' 'To pay a hateful debt,' 'With impotent rage and despair.'" _Mrs. Fountain_: "I don't deny it, Clarence. You're perfectly right; I almost wish we _had_ put it. How it would have made them hop! But they'd have known it was just the way they felt themselves." _Fountain_, going on thoughtfully: "It's the cap-sheaf of the social barbarism we live in, the hideous hypocrisy. It's no use to put it on religion. The Jews keep Christmas, too, and we know what they think of Christianity as a belief. No, we've got to go further back, to the Pagan Saturnalia-- Well, I renounce the whole affair, here and now. I'm going to spend the rest of the night bundling these things up, and to-morrow I'm going to spend the day in a taxi, going round and giving them back to the fools that sent them." _Mrs. Fountain_: "And I'm going with you. I hate it as much as you do-- Come in, Maggie!" XI MAGGIE, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN _Maggie_: "Something the elevator-boy says he forgot. It came along with the last one." _Mrs. Fountain_, taking a bundle from her: "If this is another bath-robe, Clarence! It _is_, as I live. Now if it is a woman sending it--" She picks up a card which falls out of the robe as she unfolds it. "'Love the Giver,' indeed! Now, Clarence, I insist, I demand--" _Fountain_: "Hold on, hold on, my dear. The last bath-robe that came from a woman was for _you_." _Mrs. Fountain_: "So it was. I don't know what I was thinking about; and I do beg your par-- But this is a man's bath-robe!"