Read "Mary Ware in Texas" by Annie Fellows Johnston online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
TEN days before Christmas Mary opened the bottom drawer of her bureau, in which she had placed each gift as soon as it was finished, and sitting down on the floor beside it, proceeded to take an inventory of the packages within. They were all wrapped, stamped and addressed, but she had made them ready without a single Christmas thrill. There was nothing in the climate or surroundings to suggest the holiday season, and she compared this year's preparations with the year before at Warwick Hall, when the very air seemed charged with a spirit of delightful expectancy; when everybody had secrets and went around smiling and humming snatches of carols which the choir-girls were practising for the service in the chapel.
Mechanically she counted the bundles and checked them off her list: the ones for Holland, for Joyce, for Eugenia, the bunny doll with the chamois skin head which she had made for little Patricia. She was very well satisfied with them all, as well as with the fancy trifles she had made for Lloyd and Betty and the girls at school, with whom she still kept up a correspondence. They were inexpensive, but they were original and appropriate.