After I had
given posies to Frau Nirlanger, and fastened a rose in
Frau Knapf's hard knob of hair, where it bobbed in
ludicrous discomfort, I still had enough to fill the
washbowl. My room looked like a grand opera star's
boudoir when she is expecting the newspaper reporters.
I reveled in the glowing fragrance of the blossoms and
felt very eastern and luxurious and popular. It had been
a busy, happy, work-filled week, in which I had had to
snatch odd moments for the selecting of certain wonderful
toys for the Spalpeens. There had been dolls and
doll-clothes and a marvelous miniature kitchen for the
practical and stolid Sheila, and ingenious bits of
mechanism that did unbelievable things when wound up,
for the clever, imaginative Hans. I was not to have the
joy of seeing their wide-eyed delight, but I knew that
there would follow certain laboriously scrawled letters,
filled with topsy-turvy capitals and crazily leaning words
of thanks to the doting old auntie who had been such good
fun the summer before.
Boarding-house Christmases had become an old story.
I had learned to accept them, even to those obscure and
foreign parts of turkey which are seen only on
boarding-house plates, and which would be recognized
nowhere else as belonging to that stately bird.
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