Before noon Buster had come and gone, showing off his new shoes and telling his friend about the train he had gotten that ran on a real track when you wound it up. After dinner Willie-Mae appeared bringing a naked rag doll and a set of china dishes in a blue box. And Sister Johnson sent them a mince pie as a Christmas gift.

Almost all Aunt Hager’s callers knocked at the back door, but in the late afternoon the front bell rang and Annjee sent Sandy through the cold parlor to answer it. There on the porch stood his Aunt Tempy, with several gaily wrapped packages in her arms. She was almost a stranger to Sandy, yet she kissed him peremptorily on the forehead as he stood in the doorway. Then she came through the house into the kitchen, with much the air of a mistress of the manor descending to the servants’ quarters.

“Land sakes alive!” said Hager, rising to kiss her.

Tempy hugged Annjee, too, before she sat down, stiffly, as though the house she was in had never been her home. To little black Willie-Mae she said nothing.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t invite you for Christmas dinner today, but you know how Mr. Siles is,” Tempy began to explain to her mother and sister. “My husband is home so infrequently, and he doesn’t like a house full of company, but of course Dr. and Mrs. Glenn Mitchell will be in later in the evening. They drop around any time.... But I had to run down and bring you a few presents. . . . You haven’t seen my new piano yet, have you, mother? I must come and take you home with me some nice afternoon.” She smiled appropriately, but her voice was hard.

“How is you an’ yo’ new church makin’ it?” asked Hager, slightly embarrassed in the presence of her finely dressed society daughter.

“Wonderful!” Tempy replied. “Wonderful! Father Hill is so dignified, and the services are absolutely refined! There’s never anything niggerish about them—so you know, mother, they suit me.”

“I’s glad you likes it,” said Hager.

There was an awkward silence; then Tempy distributed her gifts, kissed them all as though it were her Christian duty, and went her way, saying that she had calls to make at Lawyer and Mrs. Moore’s, and Professor Booth’s, and Madam Temple’s before she returned home. When she had gone, everybody felt relieved—as though a white person had left the house. Willie-Mae began to play again, and Hager pushed her feet out of her shoes once more, while Annjee went into the bedroom and lay down.

Sandy sat on the floor and untied his present, wrapped in several thicknesses of pink tissue paper, and found, in a bright Christmas box, a big illustrated volume of Andersen’s Fairy Tales decorated in letters of gold. With its heavy pages and fine pictures, it made the ten-cent-store books that Hager had bought him appear cheap and thin. It made his mother’s sled look cheap, too, and shamed all the other gifts the ones he loved had given him.