it to tie up currant bushes with, when it would have served
the double purpose of supporting the branches and frightening
away the birds--for it is an admitted fact that the ordinary
tomtit of commerce has a sounder aesthetic taste than the
average female relative in the country.

Then there are aunts. They are always a difficult class to
deal with in the matter of presents. The trouble is that one
never catches them really young enough. By the time one has
educated them to an appreciation of the fact that one does
not wear red woollen mittens in the West End, they die, or
quarrel with the family, or do something equally
inconsiderate. That is why the supply of trained aunts is
always so precarious.

There is my Aunt Agatha, par exemple, who sent me a pair of
gloves last Christmas, and even got so far as to choose a
kind that was being worn and had the correct number of
buttons. But--THEY WERE NINES! I sent them to a boy whom I
hated intimately: he didn't wear them, of course, but he
could have--that was where the bitterness of death came in.
It was nearly as consoling as sending white flowers to his
funeral. Of course I wrote and told my aunt that they were
the one thing that had been wanting to make existence blossom
like a rose; I am afraid she thought me frivolous--she comes
from the North, where they live in the fear of Heaven and the
Earl of Durham. (Reginald affects an exhaustive knowledge of
things political, which furnishes an excellent excuse for not
discussing them.) Aunts with a dash of foreign extraction in
them are the most satisfactory in the way of understanding