XVI
COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON
THERE are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted; and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to two very questionable sources—facts and philosophy. We will begin with—whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits’ ends. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years, and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.
Now come the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire’s palace on the Hudson, and these ransacked
