You thank him
heartily, you praise its figure, but all the time you are wishing that
it had chosen some other occasion. Your host gives you a statuette or
a large engraving; somebody else turns up with a large brass
candle-stick. It is all very gratifying, but you have got to get back
to London somehow, and, thankful though you are not to have received
the boar-hound or parrot-in-cage which seemed at one time to be
threatening, you cannot help wishing that the limits of size for a
Christmas present had been decreed by some authority who was familiar
with the look of your dressing-case.
Obviously, too, there should be a standard value for a certain type of
Christmas present. One may give what one will to one's own family or
particular friends; that is all right. But in a Christmas house-party
there is a pleasant interchange of parcels, of which the string and
the brown paper and the kindly thought are the really important
ingredients, and the gift inside is nothing more than an excuse for
these things.
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