Good evening. Welcome to the Just Sleep podcast. I'm Tasia, your host.

Every week, I will read you an old story to help you relax of the stressful day behind you and drift off to sleep.

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Tonight, I will be reading our first Christmas story of the holiday season.

Vera's First Christmas Adventure by Arnold Bennett.

So lie down, close your eyes, and let me read you a story.

One.

Five days before Christmas, Chesredine came home to his wife from a week's sojourn in London on business.

Vera, and her quality of the best-dressed woman in Beresley, met him on the doorstep, or thereabouts,

of their charming but childless home, attired in a tea-gown that would have ravished a far less

impressionable male than her husband, while he, in his quality of a prosaic and flourishing

earthenware manufacturer, pretended to take the tea gown as a matter of course, and gave her the

sober, solid kiss of a man who's been married

six years and is getting used to it. Still, the teagown had pleased him, and by certain

secret symptoms, Vera knew that it had pleased him. She hoped much from that teagown. She hoped

that he had come home in a more Pacific temper than he had

shown when he left her, and that she would carry her point after all. Now naturally, when a husband

in easy circumstances, with a pretty and pampered wife, spends a week in London and returns five days before Christmas,

certain things are rightly and properly to be expected from him. It would need an outstanding

...