_Fountain_: "Well?" He looks up at her from where he has dropped into
a chair beside the table strewn with opened and unopened gifts at the
foot of the Christmas tree.
_Mrs. Fountain_: "What _are_ you mooning about?"
_Fountain_: "What if it was all a fake? Those thousands and hundreds
of thousands of churches that pierce the clouds with their spires;
those millions of ministers and missionaries; those billions of
worshipers, sitting and standing and kneeling, and singing and
praying; those nuns and monks, and brotherhoods and sisterhoods, with
their ideals of self-denial, and their duties to the sick and poor;
those martyrs that died for the one true faith, and those other
martyrs of the other true faiths whom the one true faith tortured and
killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all
a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as
unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing, as this pagan
Christmas of ours is as unlike a Christian Christmas?"
_Mrs. Fountain_, springing up: "I knew it! I knew that it was this
Christmas giving that was making you morbid again. Can't you shake it
off and be cheerful--like me? I'm sure I have to bear twice as much of
it as you have. I've been shopping the whole week, and you've been
just this one afternoon." She begins to catch her breath, and fails in
searching for her handkerchief in the folds of her dress under the
bath-robe.
_Fountain_, offering his handkerchief: "Take mine."
_Mrs. Fountain_, catching it from him, and hiding her face in it on
the table: "You ought to help me bear up, and instead of that you
fling yourself on my sympathies and break me down." Lifting her face:
"And if it was all a fake, as you say, and an illusion, what would you
do, what would you give people in place of it?"
_Fountain_: "I don't know."
_Mrs. Fountain_: "What would you have in place of Christmas itself?"
_Fountain_: "I don't know."
_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, then, I wouldn't set myself up to preach down
everything--in a blue bath-gown. You've no idea how ridiculous you
are."
_Fountain_: "Oh, yes, I have. I can see you. You look like one of
those blue nuns in Rome. But I don't remember any lace on them."
_Mrs. Fountain_: "Well, you don't look like a blue monk, you needn't
flatter yourself, for there are none. You look like-- What are you
thinking about?"
_Fountain_: "Oh, nothing. What do you suppose is in all these packages
here? Useful things, that we need, that we must have? You know without
looking that it's the superfluity of naughtiness in one form or other.
And the givers of these gifts, they _had_ to give them, just as we've
had to give dozens of gifts ourselves. We ought to have put on our
cards, 'With the season's bitterest grudges,' 'In hopes of a return,'
'With a hopeless sense of the folly,' 'To pay a hateful debt,' 'With
impotent rage and despair.'"
_Mrs. Fountain_: "I don't deny it, Clarence. You're perfectly right; I
almost wish we _had_ put it. How it would have made them hop! But
they'd have known it was just the way they felt themselves."
_Fountain_, going on thoughtfully: "It's the cap-sheaf of the social
barbarism we live in, the hideous hypocrisy. It's no use to put it on
religion. The Jews keep Christmas, too, and we know what they think of
Christianity as a belief. No, we've got to go further back, to the
Pagan Saturnalia-- Well, I renounce the whole affair, here and now. I'm
going to spend the rest of the night bundling these things up, and
to-morrow I'm going to spend the day in a taxi, going round and giving
them back to the fools that sent them."
_Mrs. Fountain_: "And I'm going with you. I hate it as much as you
do-- Come in, Maggie!"