With a vague uneasiness I turned away from the contemplation of those walls.  The companion mansions were closed, their blinds tightly drawn; the neighbourhood was as quiet as the country, save for a slight but persistent noise that impressed itself on my consciousness.  I walked around the house to spy in the back yard; a young girl rather stealthily gathering laths, and fragments of joists and flooring, and loading them into a child’s express-wagon.  She started when she saw me.  She was little, more than a child, and the loose calico dress she wore seemed to emphasize her thinness.  She stood stock-still, staring at me with frightened yet defiant eyes.  I, too, felt a strange timidity in her presence.

“Why do you stop?” I asked at length.

“Say, is this your heap?” she demanded.

I acknowledged it.  A hint of awe widened her eyes.  Then site glanced at the half-filled wagon.

“This stuff ain’t no use to you, is it?”

“No, I’m glad to have you take it.”

She shifted to the other foot, but did not continue her gathering.  An impulse seized me, I put down my walkingstick and began picking up pieces of wood, flinging them into the wagon.  I looked at her again, rather furtively; she had not moved.  Her attitude puzzled me, for it was one neither of surprise nor of protest.  The spectacle of the “millionaire” owner of the house engaged in this menial occupation gave her no thrills.  I finished the loading.

“There!” I said, and drew a dollar bill out of my pocket and gave it to her.  Even then she did not thank me, but took up the wagon tongue and went off, leaving on me a disheartening impression of numbness, of life crushed out.  I glanced up once more at the mansion I had built for myself looming in the dusk, and walked hurriedly away....

One afternoon some three weeks after we had moved into the new house, I came out of the Club, where I had been lunching in conference with Scherer and two capitalists from New York.  It was after four o’clock, the day was fading, the street lamps were beginning to cast sickly streaks of jade-coloured light across the slush of the pavements.  It was the sight of this slush (which for a brief half hour that morning had been pure snow, and had sent Matthew and Moreton and Biddy into ecstasies at the notion of a “real Christmas"), that brought to my mind the immanence of the festival, and the fact that I had as yet bought no presents.  Such was the predicament in which I usually found myself on Christmas eve; and it was not without a certain sense of annoyance at the task thus abruptly confronting me that I got into my automobile and directed the chauffeur to the shopping district.  The crowds surged along the wet sidewalks and overflowed into the street, and over the heads of the people I stared at the blazing shop-windows decked out in Christmas greens.  My chauffeur, a bristly-haired Parisian, blew his horn insolently, men and women jostled each other to get out of the