One dollar and eighty-seven cents it was, and Della counted it three times, because she could not believe it; tomorrow was Christmas.
Sixty cents of it was in pennies, pennies she had squeezed out of the grocer, the vegetable man and the butcher until her own face burned.
The flat was furnished, eight dollars a week, and on the bell and the letterbox there was one name: Mr. James Dillingham Young. The “Dillingham” had gone up there when Jim was earning thirty dollars a week; now he earned twenty, and the letters had worn thin.
Della sat down by the window and cried, because there was nothing she could do, and that was the worst of it.
Then she stood up, wiped her face, went to the mirror, and let her hair down.
They had two treasures: Jim’s gold watch, which had been his father’s and his grandfather’s before that, and Della’s hair, which reached her waist and was the colour of a chestnut shell when light falls on it.
Della pinned her hair up quickly, put on her old coat, went out into the street, and stopped at a door that said: “Mme Sofronie. Hair of all kinds.”
“Will you buy my hair?” she asked.
The woman looked at it the way a dealer looks at goods, and then said she would give twenty dollars for it.
Della nodded, and asked nothing more.
The next two hours passed as though she were not quite inside them; she went through shops where things were dear, and shops where things were dearer, and then she found it.
It was a platinum chain for Jim’s watch, plain, without a single ornament, exactly what it should be; it cost twenty dollars, and eighty-seven cents were left.
At home she combed her short hair and looked at herself in the mirror, but for a moment she did not recognise the face that looked back at her.
Then she started supper.
When Jim came in he stopped in the doorway, and he did not shout and did not ask, he only looked at Della, and there was something in his eyes that she could not read.
“I had it cut off,” Della said quickly. “I sold it, and that is where the money for your present came from.”
Jim said nothing.
“Don’t look at me like that. Hair grows, and I couldn’t have got through Christmas with nothing to give you.”
Jim walked round the room once, sat down on the couch, put his hands on his knees, and smiled.
“Hair grows,” he said. “All right.”
Then he brought out the parcel, and Della opened it: two combs, of tortoiseshell, with jewels along the rim, the very ones she had looked at in the shop window for months and never once mentioned.
Della held them against her chest and cried, and then she held out the chain.
“It’s beautiful, Jim. I looked at it a hundred times. Let me see it on the watch.”
Jim did not move, he only leaned back on the couch, put both hands behind his head, and smiled.
“Let’s put the presents away for a while,” he said. “They’re too nice to use just now.”
“What about the watch?”
“I sold it. I bought the combs.”
Della laid the chain on the table beside the combs; down in the street the wind came in under the gate, and the gas lamp hissed on the wall.
They ate later, and the pork chops had gone hard by then, but they ate them.
The chain and the combs stayed on the table, side by side.
