But though the delight of actual motherhood was denied Elsbeth, she was spared none of its chagrins.
Stooping for years to a child's level, she was cruelly shaken when Alwynne, suddenly and inexplicably, as it always seems, grew up. It took Elsbeth almost as many years to straighten herself again. Years when Alwynne, in the arrogance of her enterprising youth, thought that Elsbeth was sometimes awfully childish. She supposed that she was growing old; she used not to be like that....
Thereafter, each Christmas, challenging comparison as it did with the memory-mellowed charm of its forerunners, emphasised the change that had taken place. Yearly the ideal Christmas lured them to the old observances; yearly the reality satisfied them less.
Elsbeth still sat up half the night on Christmas Eve, at work upon the little tree. Alwynne still planned gorgeous and laborious presents for her aunt. Elsbeth still filled a stocking (out-size) with tip-toe secrecy, and Alwynne, at sixteen, still ran across in her dressing-gown, and curled up on Elsbeth's bed to unpack it.
But at sixteen one is too old and too young to be a child any more. The tree was a fir-tree, pure and simple; the fairy lights stank of tallow; and not even for the sake of a new bright sixpence, would Alwynne, in the thick of a vegetarian fad, devour a slice of the evil-coloured Christmas pudding.
Elsbeth, as she saw her old-time jokes and small surprises that could no longer surprise, fall utterly flat, thought that school had altered Alwynne altogether; that she was assuming airs of maturity ridiculous in a child of her age, ("Sixteen? She's a mere baby still," affirmed poor Elsbeth,) that she was growing indifferent, superior, heartless. And Alwynne, trying to appear amused, wondered why Christmas was so different from what it used to be and wished heartily that Elsbeth would not try to be skittish. It didn't suit her--made her seem undignified. Each, longing for the old days, when the other had conjured up so easily the true spirit of the festival, tried her affectionate best to do so still; each, failing inevitably, inevitably blamed the other. Neither realised, that Dan Christmas is the god of very little children, and that where they are not, he, too, does not linger.