I can make no apology for addressing you as if I knew you, and hope you will forgive me. My husband is always telling me that he owes you a vast sum of money, but that is not why I am sending you the trifles that used to brighten our tree when the children were little. When I think that my Augustus is nearly forty and that you and Anita are grown women, I feel very old and in need of comfort. Dearest girl, I must not speak of what is nearest to my heart, but I am sending you love with this Christmas greeting. Some day I shall hope to know you, and you will tell me of the mother whom you never forget. Helen Marvin Mahan. Chapter 81. Thallium It was such a note as might have been written to a girl disappointed in love, but Jean felt sure that it was no such thing. Marvin loved her still, and his mother knew it and was pleading for him. It had to be answered, and after Christmas a very tremulous girl managed to write as follows: Dearest Mrs. Mahan: My mother would have loved you dearly for what you have written to me. And if you could have seen the faces around our Christmas tree, you would have been comforted for your own children who have grown so big and splendid. One of the smallest boys—his father works on the patrol boat—kept pointing his little pink finger at the biggest ornament and saying “Moon.” So finally I had to give him the moon to carry home. It made me think of the very first summer I can remember, when I started up the hill to get the moon as it rose through the pines. I have got over doing that, but it has not been easy. Now that Christmas is over, our life slips along in the same quiet way as ever. My father stays perfectly well in this cold air. Just now he is sitting on the porch all wrapped up in his old buffalo robe and wearing his old beaver cap. One squirrel is sitting on his shoulder and another on top of his cap, eating hazel nuts, while he is probably thinking out the form of some lost Scythian word from which “squirrel” is derived. He says that the Greeks were not very critical when they thought it meant “shadow-tail.” Will you please give my love to Mr. Mahan and to Anita? I envy her the work she does for the soldiers. And please believe that I am always your grateful Jean Winifred. Having thus evaded a mother’s love as well as she could, Jean again tried to lose herself in the affairs of the universe. Again she watched her star swing through its wintry orbit, a process which thrilled her with its accuracy. To be sure it seemed to have no purpose, but she no longer felt obliged to defend God’s purposes to anybody.