too insignificant for their earnest discussion, and no pleasure
too small to share. To-day the chief object of their interest was
his mother's Christmas present to him, a check for fifty dollars,
"for my boy's winter coat."

They looked at the slip of paper at regular intervals. To Bert it
brought a pleasant thought of the thin, veiny hand that had penned
it, the little silk-clad form and trimly netted gray hair. He
remembered his mother's tiny sitting room, full of begonias and
winter sunshine and photographs of the family, with a feeling that
while mother could never again know rapturous happiness like his
own, yet it was good to think of her as content and comfortable,
with her tissue-wrapped presents from the three daughters-in-law
lying on her table.

But to Nancy the check meant the future only: it meant her
handsome Bert dressed at last in suitable fashion, in a "big,
fuzzy, hairy coat." She pointed out various men's coats in the
windows they passed that afternoon, and on the other young men who
were walking with wives and babies.

But Bert had his own ideas. When Nancy met him down town a day or
two later, to go pick the coat, she found him quite unmanageable.
He said that there was no hurry about the coat--they were right
here in the housekeeping things, why not look at fireless cookers?
In the end they bought an ice-cream freezer, and a fireless
cooker, and two pairs of arctic overshoes, and an enormous oval-
shaped basket upon which the blushing Nancy dropped a
surreptitious kiss when the saleswoman was not looking, and a warm
blue sweater for Nancy, and, quite incidentally, an eighteen-