This was Miss Katherine’s second Christmas with us, but the first she had managed herself.  Last Christmas she had been at the Asylum such a short time she kept quiet, and just saw how things were done.  And not done.  But this year she asked if she could provide the entertainment, and the difference in these last two Christmases was like the difference in the way things are done from love and duty.

And oh! love is so much the best!

I do believe I was the happiest child in all the world that day, and I didn’t come out of that cloud of glory until night.  Mrs. Christopher Pryor took me out.

She had come over with some of the Board ladies to see the tree and things, and as she was going home I heard her say: 

“I don’t approve of all this.  Not at all.  Not at all.  These children have had a more elaborate Christmas than mine.  They’ve had as good a dinner, a handsomer tree, and as many presents as some well-off people.  It’s all nonsense, putting notions in their heads when they’re as poor as poverty itself and have their living to make.  I don’t approve of it.  Not at all.”

She bristled so stiff and shook her head so vigorous that the little jet ornaments on her bonnet just tinkled like bells, and one fell off.

Mrs. Christopher Pryor is one of the people who would like to tell the Lord how to run this earth.  She could run it.  That He lets the rain fall and sun shine on everybody alike is a thing she don’t approve of either.  As for poor people, she thinks they ought to be thankful for breath, and not expect more than enough to keep it from going out for good.

She’s very decided in her views, and never keeps them to herself.  It’s the one thing she gives away.  Everything else she holds on to with such a grip that it keeps her upper lip so pressed down on her under lip that she breathes through her nose most of the time.

She’s a very curious shape.  Being stout, she has to hold her head up to keep her chin off her fatness; and she goes in so at the waist, coming out top and bottom, that you would think something in her would get jammed out of place.  You really would.

There are seven daughters.  No sons.  The boys call their place Hen-House.  There is a husband, but nobody seems to notice him; and when with his wife, he always walks behind.

Miss Webb says she’s sorry for a man whose wife is too active in the church.  Mrs. Pryor is.  She leads all the responses; and as for the chants, she takes them right out of the choir’s mouth and soars off with them.

I never could bear her; and when I heard her say those words to Mrs. Marsden, I came right down to earth and was Martha Cary in a minute.  I’d been Mary all day, and, like a splash in a mud-puddle, she made me Martha; and I heard myself say: 

“No, Mrs. Pryor, we know you don’t approve.  You never yet have let a child here forget she was a Charity child, and only people who make others happy will approve.”