L2-3-1

One dollar and eighty -seven cents, that was all, and sixty cents of it in the smallest pieces of money, pennies, pennies saved one and two at a time by negotiating with the men at the market who sold vegetables and meat, negotiating until one's face burned with the silent knowledge of being poor.

Three times Della counted it, one dollar and eighty -seven cents, and the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but sit down and cry, so Della cried, which led to the thought that life is made up of little cries and smiles with more little cries than smiles.

Della finished her crying and dried her face. She stood by the window and looked out, unhappily, at a gray cat walking along a gray fence in a gray backyard.

Tomorrow would be Christmas day, and she had only one dollar and eighty -seven cents to buy her husband Jim a gift.

She had been saving every penny she could for months with this result. Jim earned twenty dollars a week, which does not go far. Expenses had been greater than she had expected. They always are.

Many a happy hour she had spent planning to buy something nice for him, something fine and rare, something close to being worthy of the honor of belonging to Jim.

There was a tall glass mirror between the windows of the room. Suddenly Della turned from the window and stood before the glass mirror and looked at herself.

Her eyes were shining, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Quickly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now Mr. and Mrs. James Dillingham Young had two possessions which they valued. One was Jim's gold timepiece, the watch that had been his fathers and his grandfather's. The other was Della's hair.

Had the queen of Sheba lived in their building, Della would have let her hair hang out the window to dry, just to reduce the value of the queen's jewels.

So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her, shining like a brown waterfall. It reached below her knees and made itself almost like a covering for her. And then quickly she put it up again. She stood still while a few tears fell on the floor.