old and ingrained as time itself. For seventeen years," quickened the woman, "I have been 'gathering gifts' from all over the world, ripping things out of impersonal wholesale, as it were, to apply them as best I might to this person's, or the other's, individual need. Say, if you want to, that I have had nothing else to do on my travels except to spend money, yet the fact remains that as far as my own personal satisfactions are concerned in the matter of giving, I have been pouring presents for seventeen years into a bottomless pit. Never once, I 24 mean," smiled the woman, "never once, yearning over the abyss as the gift went down, have I ever heard the entrancing thud that a gift ought to make when it lands on real appreciation. Never!"

"Well, you are a cynic!" conceded the Young Doctor.

"I admit it," said the woman. "Yet even a cynic may be fair- minded." For the first time in her tired, sophisticated face, shrewdness and irony were equally routed by sheer perplexity. "I've thought it all out as decently as I could from the other person's point of view," she puzzled. "I see his side, I think. I have no legal, constitutional right, of course, to demand a person's gratitude for any gift which is purely voluntary on my part. Lots of people in all probability would infinitely rather not have a gift than be obliged thereby to write a 'Thank you' for it. Against such a person's wish and inclination, I mean, I've no right to pry 'Thank you's' out of him, even with gold-mounted golf sticks or first editions. I've no right to be a highwayman, I mean. Even if I'm literally dying for a 'Thank you' I've no more right, I mean, to 25hold up a person with a gift than I'd have to hold him up with a gun."

"Then what are you fussing about?" asked the Young Doctor.

"I'm fussing about the hatefulness of it," said the woman. All the shrewdness came suddenly back to her face. "This is what I mean!" she cried sharply. "When I stay in Paris three months, for instance, to collect a trousseau for the daughter of a man who meant something to me once in my youth, and receive in due time from that girl a single page of gothic handwriting thanking me no matter how gushingly for my 'magnificent gift,' I tell you I could fairly kill her for her stingy receiving! Not a word from her about hats, you understand? Not a comment on shoes! Not the vaguest, remotest mention of chiffon veils, silk stockings, evening gowns, street suits, mink furs, anything! Just the whole outfit, trunk after trunk of 'em, all lumped in together and dismissed perfectly casually under the lump word 'gift!' and it wasn't just a 'gift' that I gave her, you understand?" said the woman with a sudden real twinge of emotion. "Almost nobody, you know, ever 26gives just a 'gift.' What I really gave her, of course, was three whole months of my taste, time, temperament! Three whole months of my wanting-to-give! Three whole months of a woman's dreams for a young girl! What I really gave her, of course, was the plaudits of her elders, the envies of all her girl chums, the new, unduplicatable pride and dignity of a consciously perfect equipment! What I really gave her, of course, was the light in her bridegroom's eyes when he first saw her merge a throb of mist and pearls through the gray gloom of the cathedral chancel! What I really gave her of course was the——"

"Yes, but you surely know that she appreciated the gift," deprecated the Young Doctor.

"Why, of course she appreciated the gift!" snapped the woman. "But what I'm trying to find is some one who'd appreciate the giver! Anybody can appreciate a gift," she added with unprecedented scorn. "Pleased?" snapped the woman. "Why, of course, she was pleased! The only thing I'm fussing about is that she was too stingy to share her pleasure 27with me! The fire I worked so hard to light, lit all right, but simply refused to warm me! That's it! Why! Did she note by one single extra flourish of her pen that the lining of her opera cloak was like the petalling of a pink Killarney rose? Or that the texture of her traveling suit would have made a princess strut with pride? When she lumped a dozen Paris hats into the one word 'nice' did she dream for one single instant that she had lulled my perfectly human hunger to know whether it was the red one or the green one or the gold which most became her ecstatic little face? Did it ever occur to her to tell me what her lover said about the gay little brown leather hunting suit? Six months hence, freezing to death in some half-heated palace on the Riviera, is there one chance in ten thousand, do you think, that she will write me to say, 'Oh, you darling, how did you ever happen to think of a moleskin breakfast coat and footies?' And again!" scolded the woman. "When a stodgy old missionary on his way back to Africa relaxes enough on a mid-ocean moonlight night so that it's fun a month later to send him a mule and cart just to keep his 28faithful, clumsy old feet off the African sands, do you think it's fun for him to send me eight smug laborious pages complimenting me—without a moon in them,—on 'the great opportunities for doing good which my enormous wealth must give me,' and commending me specially 'for this most recent account of my stewardship which I have just evidenced in my noble gift'?" For one single illuminating flash humor twitched back into the woman's eyebrow. "Stewardship—bosh!" she confided. "On a picture post card—with stubby, broken- nosed pencil—I would so infinitely rather he had scribbled, 'Bully for you, Old Girl! This is some mule!'"

With a little sigh of fatigue she sank back into her pillows. "'More blessed to give than to receive?' Quite evidently!" she said. "Everywhere it's the same! People love pictures and never note who painted them! People love stories and never remember who wrote them! Why, in any shop in this city," she roused, "I wager you could go in and present a hundred dollar bill to the seediest old clerk you saw—and go back in an hour and he wouldn't know you by sight! 'The gift without 29the giver is bare?'" she quoted savagely. "Ha! What they really meant was 'The giver added to the gift is a bore?'"

"Well, what do you propose to do about it?" quizzed the Young Doctor a bit impatiently.

"I propose to do this about it!" said the woman. "I propose to become a reformer!"

"A reformer?" jeered the Young Doctor.

"Well, then—an avenger! if you like the word better," conceded the woman. "Oh, I shall keep right on buying things, of course," she hastened mockingly to assure him. "And giving things, of course. One could hardly break so suddenly the habit and vice of a life time. Only I shan't scatter my shots all over the lot any more. But concentrate my deadliest aim on one single individual. Indeed, I think I shall advertise," mocked the woman. "In that amazing column of all daily papers so misleadingly labeled 'wants' instead of able-to-haves I shall insert some sort of a statement to the effect that:

"An eccentric middle-aged woman of fabulous wealth, lavish generosity, and no common sense whatsoever, will receive into her 'lovely Southern 30 Home' one stingy receiver. Strictest reference required. Object: Reformation or—annihilation."

"It would be interesting to see the answers you'd get!" rallied the Young Doctor with unwonted playfulness.

Almost imperceptibly the woman twisted her eyebrows. "Oh, of course, I admit that most of them would be from asylums," she said. "Offering me special rates. But there's always a chance, of course, that—that—" Straight as a pencil-ruling both eyebrows dropped suddenly into line. "But I'm quite used to taking chances, thank you!" she finished with exaggerated