MISS MATFIELD'S NEW YEAR 385

wool snow were still rolling past. The festive season-
help! It was all an elaborate stunt to persuade every-
body to spend money buying useless things for every-
body else. She tried her novel again: The months
passed, and still Jeffrey made no sign. He had not for-
given her. In despair, Jenifer accepted an invitation to
join the Mainwarings in Madeira, returned to a gay but
feverish fortnight in Chelsea (where John Anderson
sought her out everywhere and never left her side), and
then appeared, still smiling, still audacious, but with a
vaguely haunted look, at Cap d'Antibes. It was there she
heard that Jeffrey had been seen at Miami—"And with
Gloria Judge, my dear!3 And that was quite enough of
that. Who cared what happened to Jenifer and Jeffrey,
the pair of ninnies? And why were all these novels
always filled with people who spent all their time travel-
ling about to mere resorts and spas, and deciding whom
to live with next? Nobody ever did any work in them.
She returned to the subject of Christmas. It was, on
the whole, she decided, revolting. You gave people a
lot of silly things, diaries and calendars and rot, or use-
ful things that were not right, gloves of the wrong size
and stockings of the wrong shade (and she would have to
be thinking out her presents now, and she was terribly
hard up); and they in their turn gave you silly things
and the useful things that were not right. You ate
masses of food you didn't want (and even Dr. Matfield,
who had ideas about diet, said it didn't matter at Christ-
mas), and then you sat about, pretending to be jolly, but
really stodged, sleepy, headachy, and in urgent need of
bicarbonate of soda. If you stayed at home, you yawned,
tried to convince your mother that you hadn't a rich
secret life you were hiding from her, and drearily

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