Short Stories of Various Types | Page 5

had been made for Jim and no one else.
There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of
them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain, simple and chaste in
design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by
meretricious ornamentation--as all good things should do. It was even
worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be
Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value--the description applied to
both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried
home with the eighty-seven cents. With that chain on his watch Jim
might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the
watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old
leather strap he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to
prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas
and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to
love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends--a mammoth
task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny close-lying curls
that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at
her reflection in the mirror, long, carefully, and critically.
"If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second
look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what
could I do--Oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?"
At seven o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the
back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on
the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she
heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned
white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers
about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please,
God, make him think I am still pretty."
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and
very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two--and to be burdened
with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of
quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in
them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor
surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she
had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that
peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
"Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut
off and sold it because I couldn't live through Christmas without giving
you a present. It'll grow out again--you won't mind, will you? I just had
to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say 'Merry Christmas,' Jim, and
let's be happy. You don't know what a nice--what a beautiful, nice gift
I've got for you."

"You've cut off your hair?" asked Jim laboriously, as if he had not
arrived at that patent fact yet, even after the hardest mental labor.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Della. "Don't you like me just as well,
anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?"
Jim looked about the room curiously.
"You say your hair is gone?" he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
"You needn't look for it," said Della. "It's sold, I tell you--sold and gone,
too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe
the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with a sudden
serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall
I put the chops on, Jim?"
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della.
For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some
inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a
million a year--what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would
give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts but that
was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the
table.
"Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there
is anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could
make me like