"She couldn't for two reasons," said the Idiot. "In the first place, her sensibilities were such that she could not have pawned a present just received, and, in the second place, she lived in the town of Hohokus on the Nepperhan, and there isn't a pawnshop within a radius of fifty miles of her home. Besides, it's easier to sneak into a pawnshop with a wedding-ring for your collateral than to drive up with a van big enough to hold a complete set of Ruskin bound in full calf. It takes nerve and experience to do that with a cool and careless _mien_, and, whatever you may have in that respect, Mr. Bib, there are few refined widows in reduced circumstances who are similarly gifted. Then take the case of my friend Billups--some sharp of a tailor got out a judgment against Billups for ninety-eight dollars for a bill he couldn't pay on the fifteenth of December. Billups got his name in the papers, and received enough notoriety to fill him with ambition to go on the stage, and it nearly killed him, and what do you suppose his friends did when Christmas came around? Did they pay off that judgment and relieve him of the odium of having his name chalked up on the public slate? Not they. They sent him forty dollars' worth of golf-clubs, sixteen dollars' worth of cuff-buttons, eight ten-dollar umbrellas, a half-dozen silver match-boxes, a cigar-cutter, and about two hundred dollars' worth of other trash that he's got to pay storage-room for. And on top of that, in order to keep up his end, Billups has had to hang up a lot of tradesmen for the match-cases and cigar-cutters and umbrellas and trash he's sent to his generous friends in return for their generosity." "Oh, rot," interrupted the Bibliomaniac. "What an idiot your friend Billups must be. Why didn't he send the presents he received to others, and so saved his money to pay his debts with?" "Well, I guess he didn't think of that," said the Idiot. "We haven't all got the science of Christmas-giving down as fine as you have, Mr. Bib. But that is a valuable suggestion of yours and I'll put it down among the things that can be done in the plan I am formulating for the painless Christmas." "We can't relieve one another's necessities unless we know what they are, can we?" asked Mr. Whitechoker.