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 whole troop of damsels who meander where they will in quest of rosebuds. Here is Robert Herrick's Lilla deliberately and successfully discarding marriage for an unsanctioned union. Here is Margaret Prescott Montague's Julie (in Deep Channel) finding in an illicit relationship the effective key to a larger and more spiritual life. Here is even Mrs. Gerould permitting a grave and thoughtful illegal relationship to the hero of Conquistador, whom she would apparently have us regard as the very pink of essential purity. No single explanation will account for the community in "destructive" tendency discernible in the latest phase of the movement; or for the fact that there is hardly one in a dozen recent novels which Cornelia would care to see in the hands of her daughter; or for the more alarming fact that, if there were one such novel in a dozen, Cornelia's daughter probably would not care to read it.

Since, in the United States, marriage has been by no means a legally irretrievable disaster, it would be absurd to point to the rigor of our law as a very important occasion of the widespread indifference or disrespect for chastity exhibited or reflected by many American writers. The occasions of our revolt lie deeper than that, and many

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Rh as an actually divine being, is successfully taught in every village school, and provides the popular support for nationalism. The nationalistic aims of Japan are not merely economic; they are also dynastic and territorial in a mediæval way. The morality of the Japanese is not utilitarian, but intensely idealistic. Filial piety is the basis, and includes patriotism, because the Mikado is the father of his people. The Japanese outlook has the same kind of superstitious absence of realism that one finds in thirteenth-century theories as to the relations of the Emperor and the Pope. But in Europe the Emperor and the Pope were different people, and their quarrels promoted freedom of thought; in Japan, since 1868, they are combined in one sacred person, and there are no internal conflicts to produce doubt.

Japan, unlike China, is a religious country. The Chinese doubt a proposition until it is proved to be true; the Japanese believe it until it is proved to be false. I do not know of any evidence against the view that the Mikado is divine. Japanese religion is essentially nationalistic, like that of the Jews in the Old Testament. Shinto, the State religion, has been in the main invented since 1868, and propagated by education in schools. (There was of course an old Shinto religion, but most of what constitutes modern Shintoism is new.) It is not a religion which aims at being universal, like Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam; it is a tribal religion, only intended to appeal to the Japanese. Buddhism subsists side by side with it, and is believed by the same people. It is customary to adopt

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 causes conspire to give to our current fiction its unwonted aspect of levity and license.

First, as a literary inheritance, the Wells-Galsworthy group of the elder novelists bequeathed to their successors a profound skepticism about the legal touchstone of chastity, together with a pleasant rule of virtue which tends, as a social regulation, to be unworkable, since it is incapable of objective and public application. Their "rule," developed a little, lands one in an anarchical moral individualism; and their successors developed it by omitting the word "permanent" from the definition of virtue.

Secondly, the appearance of a good many rather frothily wanton pictures of frothily wanton younger sets may still be attributed to reaction from the austerities of war; the writers of the futilitarian school take chastity lightly because they take everything lightly: for examples, Mr. Carl Van Vechten and Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald—though it must be admitted that the latter, in The Beautiful and Damned, has written the most impressive temperance tract of our time. (I wonder whether Cornelia noticed that it is a temperance tract.)

Thirdly, women are discovering various means

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 of avoiding the inevitable penalties which the earlier novelists inflicted upon sorrowful blue-eyed girls who stooped to folly: they don't, in fiction at least, so often have to abandon a baby (Adam Bede), or to lose their job (Esther Waters), or to be barred from marriage (Tess of the Durbervilles), or to suffer ostracism or exile (David Copperfield).

Fourthly, as in the use of cocktails and tobacco, the double standard is manifestly giving ground before a single standard, and that a masculine standard: see any novel of the literary and artistic "villages" of New York or Chicago—for example, those of Mr. Floyd Dell. In Meredith Nicholson's Broken Barriers, an extraordinary disclosure from the Indiana school, unchastity is almost blandly presented as, for a considerable group of young business women, something like the accepted avenue to social advancement and as a preliminary to a good marriage.

Fifthly, chastity, legal and spiritual, has for a dozen years been under fire in this country as a distinctive aspect of that "Puritanism" which, as we know, must be destroyed, root and branch, before we shall have any art, letters, or society that are really worth mention.

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 Sixthly, the idea of sex as a sacred mystery, under protection of Church and State, has given ground before an interesting series of competing ideas: the idea of sex as a chapter in physiology; the idea of sex as a social asset and a contribution which every good mixer makes to the occasion; and the idea of sex as a horrible nuisance.

Seventhly, there is appearing here and there in current literature evidence of the growth among us of an æsthetic philosophy which rejects the moral valuations of life. Its doctrine is briefly this:—You can't be sure that any act will yield you happiness. You can't be sure that any act will be virtuous. You can be sure that every act will yield you experience. Let us go in for experience, and value our acts according to the quantity and intensity of the experience which they yield.

Mr. Hergesheimer at present, I think, best represents the æsthetic point of view. I am afraid that Mr. Hergesheimer is just a little bit of a poseur. He pretends to feel surprised that many people regard his books as of immoral tendency. I myself am not one of those who are much worried by the moral aspects of his work. If he were content to let the novels speak for themselves,

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 few people would guess how unorthodox the author is. As a matter of fact Mr. Hergesheimer is a renegade Presbyterian. He is a Presbyterian turned artist. He is proud of his apostasy and he likes to talk about it. He has shaken off his patrimonial "Puritanism"; he finds life more delectable since; and he delights to find a cool spot in a Havana hotel, and to stretch out his legs and discourse somewhat expansively, for the benefit of his fellow citizens north of the Gulf, upon his "emancipation," with frequent pointed references to his informal dinner-jacket of Chinese silk, the orange blossoms in his buttonhole, the flourished Larrañaga cigar in his fingers, and the frigid mixture of Ron Bacardi, sugar, and vivid green lime at his elbow.

As an artist, he is interested in two things: first in the luxurious, the colorful, the exotic; and second, in the poetry of passionate idealisms, martyr-hot. He himself exhibits a middle-aged prudence and coolness; he possesses a certain amount of taste of a certain kind, which preserves him from a certain kind of now popular grossness; he paints himself as a connoisseur of sensations: these qualities, together with his old-fashioned romantic attachment to "grand passions," give

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 him a salient distinction, indeed real isolation, among the "Jacksonian rabble" who imagine that Mr. Hergesheimer is one of them, and who still constitute the main body of the anti-Puritan movement. Yet, as an artist, he finds himself constrained to be essentially an anti-moralist. He welcomes all experience in proportion to its intensity and richness of color. He cannot help admitting his "preference for girls who have the courage of their emotions." He cannot help confessing his artistic pleasure in observing a crucifix as the background of a prostitute. He cannot deny himself the revenge upon his Presbyterian ancestors, which consists in referring to the prostitutes of a house in Havana as "informal girls," as if, forsooth, when one emerges from the ancestral hypocrisies of Presbyterianism, "formality" remains the only real distinction between these girls and any other sort of girls.

Oh Cornelia—I begin to understand what troubles you!

Mr. D. H. Lawrence seems to have set out with the notion that sex is the greatest thing in the world, and with the correlative notion that we can't very well have too much of it, or have it on too easy terms. He is still, if I understand

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 him, a great believer in experience for experience's sake, and he passes in many quarters for a dangerous immoralist. To the conventional sense, indeed, he may easily appear to write his novels as if the world of conventional morals had no existence. Even in Sons and Lovers, his heroes and heroines explore their sexual good where they find it with barbaric or übermenschlich indifference to legality—or, should one say, with the indifference to legality prevalent among a coal-mining population? In his more recently published Women in Love, his seekers of experience and self-realization are men and women who have exhausted the possibilities of gratification through any ordinary intimacy of relationship. The book has offended pudency by a few intelligible paragraphs of plain speech where we were formerly accustomed to silence. But its really shocking aspect is its studious, remorseless revelation of what a horrible, devouring mania sexual passion may be: how involved with mortal fear; and with cold, probing curiosity; and with murderous hatred. One of the characteristic high spots in the story is that in which Hermione expresses the kind of intimacy that she desires with Birkin, and consummates her "voluptuous ecstasy" by seizing

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 a beautiful ball of lapis lazuli and bringing it crashing down upon his head. Except for a lively incident of this sort here and there, Women in Love must impress the ordinary novel-reader as intolerably dull, dreary, difficult, and mad: and anyone who declares that it makes sex attractive should be punished by being required to read it through.

Mr. Lawrence's interest in it is predominantly the interest of an exploring moralist who has specialized in sexual relations and is coming to conclusions which are important, if true. He is coming to the conclusion that—for men, at any rate—passional surrender is not the greatest thing in the world. He is coming to the conclusion that the romantic poets and the romantic novelists—including, perhaps, Mr. Wells and Mr. Galsworthy—have all been on the wrong tack in representing as the height of human experience that ecstasy in which one individuality is merged and absorbed in another. This he regards as in its essential nature an ideal of decadence. This is an aspiration toward death and disintegration, from which the inevitable reaction is disgust. The virtue of a man is to preserve his own integrity and resist the dissolution of union. "When

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 he makes the sexual consummation the supreme consummation, even in his secret soul, he falls into the beginnings of despair." I quote this sentence from Mr. Lawrence's fantastic and curious Fantasia of the Unconscious. And from his Studies in Classic American Literature I quote these words, calculated to trouble both his enemies and his friends: "The essential function of art is moral. Not æsthetic, nor decorative, nor pastime and recreation, but moral. The essential function of art is moral." This will perhaps trouble Mr. Hergesheimer more than it troubles me.

Among the later novelists of the Middle West one might choose either Sherwood Anderson or Ben Hecht as a striking representative of the anti-Puritan movement. But there is so much cloudy symbolism in the author of Many Marriages that one may more expeditiously indicate the position of the author of Gargoyles—and of less widely circulated works. Mr. Hecht, generally speaking, appears to be the inheritor of Mr. Dreiser's moral outfit, during the latter's lifetime. He interests me more than Mr. Dreiser ever did, because his intellectual processes are much more rapid. Mr. Dreiser reaches his conclusion by a slow, ver-

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 miculous emotional approach, like the promenade of the lumbricus terrestris; Mr. Hecht darts at his like a wasp. He is a stylist, and he feels a kind of ecstasy in the stabbing use of words. He is a satirist exulting in the stripping of shams. In Gargoyles, he is a cynic with the point of mad King Lear crying:—

He is an angry and disenchanted moralist. But he is also—and this is the particularly interesting aspect of his case—an angry and disenchanted "immoralist." The emancipated heroes of Gargoyles and Erik Dorn hurl themselves over precipices of experience to wallow in abysses of spiritual inanity and despair. Yet before they are emancipated, as Mr. Hecht sees them, they are in an equal agony of moral chains. Basine, in Gargoyles, loathes all women for his wife's sake. "His distaste for his wife kept him faithful to her because his imagination baulked at the idea of embracing another Henrietta." Again we are told—almost in the Dreiserian phraseology—that "cowardice" had made him

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 an excited champion of domestic felicity, marital fidelity, and kindred ideas.

In his symbolical romance, Mr. Hecht represents man as an agonized animal, self-crucified on the cross of his moral ideals, martyrizing himself in behalf of laws and conventions to which his desires and appetites are in unvanquishable opposition. Hitherto, his satire of conventional sexual morality has not revealed to me any constructive element: its caustic and sulphurous bolts leap from an anarchical darkness of all-embracing disillusion and fathomless disgust.

The note of sexual disgust is, to the student of contemporary morals, a point of high interest in the recent realistic fiction. This note of disgust is clamorous in Blackguard, by Mr. Hecht's spiritual satellite, Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim. It is a steady undertone through the novels and short stories of Sherwood Anderson; in The Narrow House and Narcissus of Evelyn Scott; and in the Rahab of Waldo Franck. It is a cry of diabolic torture in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as Young Man; and in Ulysses it is a rolling ordurous pandemonium.

In reading the novels of Ben Hecht, Maxwell Bodenheim, Sherwood Anderson, Evelyn Scott,

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 Waldo Franck, and James Joyce, one's first impression is frequently of wonder as to what motive can prompt an author to perpetuate a record of experience so humiliatingly painful, and a vision of souls so atrociously ugly. Is the motive revenge upon life for having taken them in? Is the motive to cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff that preys upon the reason? The mad King Lear perhaps felt relieved when he had completed his psychoanalysis of the "simp'ring dame"; but when he had reached his conclusion in "burning, scalding, stench, consumption," he cried perforce: "Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination!" In the Emetic School of fiction appears the reductio ad nauseam of the idea of sex as a social asset. No lust-bitten monk wrestling with hallucinations in a mediæval cloister could have made the entire subject more bewilderingly detestable than this group of anti-Puritan and anti-Catholic emancipators, who apparently set out with a desire to make it pleasant.

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this point, as it seemed to me, I had accumulated sufficient material to enable me to resume my conversation with Cornelia, without being immediately extinguished by the immense superiority of her intuitions regarding what is right. Meditating on the evolution of the idea of chastity from Goldsmith and Scott to James Joyce and Ben Hecht, I went to see her again.

It was a pleasant midsummer morning, enlivened by a cool breeze from the lake. I came up through the wood path into the garden, and found her sitting in the pergola, cool and fresh as the breeze. Her hands lay still in her lap, clasped upon an open book. Unaware of my presence, her gaze seemed to have gone dreamingly down the green slope, to rest in a kind of hovering question above the bright young animation of the tennis court. As I appeared, she looked up quickly and said instantly:—

"Sit here, and let me read you these lovely verses of Walter de la Mare's."

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 "Do," I replied; and she read with—oh, just a suspicion of a tremor in her clear smooth voice, these lines:—

She closed the book, and we were silent for a moment, in which I felt within myself curious little surges of sympathy breaking over rocks of difference. And then she said: "Well?"

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 "Cornelia," I answered, "you were right. The idea of chastity has been challenged, is being challenged, on all sides, in many ways, for many reasons."

I made a discreet summary of my discoveries, and concluded: "Current fiction reflects a condition bordering on anarchy."

"Couldn't one know that without making an investigation, without ploughing through these dreadful books?"

"Perhaps," I responded; "but, Cornelia, I think you are wrong in an important respect. I think there has been a real change in standards, and that even very nice people no longer think just as they used to think. At least, they no longer say what they used to say, and they are immeasurably more tolerant of what other people think."

"Do you imagine," she persisted, "that this new tolerance indicates general moral progress? I think it indicates general moral laxity. Come, let us be definite. At what points precisely do you fancy there is any advantage to be gained by taking sexual relations away from the protection of Church and State and committing them to the whims of individuals?"

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 "My dear Cornelia," I protested, "the prevailing theory is not that Church and State have 'protected' sexual relations. The popular theory is that Church and State have ignored them—or, at least, in attempting to regulate them, have ignored so many exceptional cases that the regulations are invalid. For all these cases, the novel has been a kind of court of last resort. On the whole, I believe that it has greatly enriched the ideal of virtue by giving a hearing to the innumerable cases in which legality is the mask of nearly intolerable conditions."

"Intolerable conditions," interrupted Cornelia, "are usually the result of imprudent marriages, marriages for advantage, marriages without love. Those who make such marriages should expect to pay the price. It is sentimentality to discard a good rule to save a few exceptional individuals. Incompatibility of temper is no harder to bear than smallpox or anything else that marriage may let one in for."

"I am explaining how we differ," I resumed. "I find myself in pretty full sympathy with the current tendency to revolt against the doctrine of the irretrievable as applied by Goldsmith and certain of the Victorians. The earlier Georgian

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 principle that virtue, in this connection, means to maintain permanent relations with one who is thoroughly agreeable to you begins to sound to my ears like orthodoxy, as does also the companion principle, that to maintain permanent relations with one who is thoroughly disagreeable to you is vice. And though I am not ready to subscribe to all the possible corollaries of these two positions, I seem to see, gradually emerging from them, a new and better idea of chastity—of clean relationships—which will make "nice" people not less but more fastidious in their intimacies, not less but more austere in yielding the citadel of body and spirit."

"Nothing will emerge from these principles," said Cornelia decisively, "without a rule—without a rule which Church and State can enforce upon people who are not nice. You have admitted that the Wells-Galsworthy test of successful marriage tends to be 'unworkable.' You admit that the word 'permanent' tends to drop out of the principle, and that then you have, instead of a substitute for law, a permission for anarchy. You even admit that the novelists already reflect a condition approaching anarchy. Don't you think, after all, it is about time to call a halt?"

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 "No," I insisted stubbornly; "the movement of indefinite anarchical expansion halts itself. And I stand by the novelists, even by the Emetic School, as showing where the movement halts: in blind alleys, against iron necessities, in miasmic swamps, in ennui, in despair, in disgust unfathomable. You cannot guess, Cornelia; without years of such reading as I am happily certain you will never undertake, you cannot understand what comfort and reassurance I find in the fathomless disgust exhibited in our most advanced novelists—disgust for the life that is dedicated to sex. The disgust of the novelists upholds the splendor of the Church and the majesty of the Law. Upborne by the disgust of the novelists, like a ship by the briny behemoth-haunted deep, marriage may yet spread again her proud full sail for fresh voyages. These novelists reveal obscene things in their deep-sea caves, but they administer whatever antidote is required to the obscenity of their speech. They drive home their moral with an appalling effectiveness beyond the rivalry of critical comment. They deliver the shattering challenge to unchastity. They have shown the emancipated moderns capable of dodging all but one of the consequences which their

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 elders appointed for unchastity; but they have not shown the moderns capable of dodging the stench of a disintegrated personality, which fumes in their books like a last irreducible hell. To safeguard the innocency of your son and daughter, I incline to believe that one whiff from these caverns might be as potent as Heine's prayer. Consciously or not, these novelists are preparing a counter-revolution."

"What direction, pray, will that take?" inquired Cornelia, to whom God has beautifully denied ability to follow such an argument.

"I shall not prophesy in detail," I said, looking down the slope towards the tennis court. "Is your contribution to the Younger Generation in that match?"

"Yes," she replied, "and isn't it delightful to see how keen they are about it?"

"It is. It indicates to me one of the directions of the counter-revolution. Historians in the future, surveying the monuments of our children's time, are going to refer to this as the beginning of the great age of stadium-building in America. They will see in this movement a religious significance, not yet visible to us; and they will expatiate in glowing terms on the period when, with extrava-

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 gant and sacrificial adoration of an ideal, our youth exalted the cleanness and hardness of athletic games, and religiously subjected themselves to the rules and rigor of the game—to that arbitrary, elaborate, inflexible, yet self-imposed system of ethics which alone makes any good game possible. I am hoping that our children's generation will contain more real sportsmen than ours did—fewer quitters, fewer squealers, fewer players crying out to have the rules changed after the game is on; and no one so silly as to suppose there can be a game without rules."

"That hope is rather remote, isn't it?"

"Rather. I have another, more immediate. I hope that in the early stages of the counter-revolution our sophisticated sons and daughters will scrutinize 'the idea of sex,' coolly extract from it the part that belongs to physiology and pathology; and then disuse the word as synonym for every other element in the complex human relationship which sometimes makes human beings paradisiacally happy in their blossoming season and content enough with each other even into wintry old age. I have some hope that the Emetic School may help our children to understand that sex and sexual self-realization are not, in

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 the long view, the main substance of what youth hungers for."

"Go on!" cried Cornelia, encouragingly.

"I hope that they will make real progress in psychoanalysis. I hope that, when they feel the ache of the soul's ultimate solitude and are restless and full of vague desires they may be capable of lucid introspection; that they may be frank and plain with themselves, and call things by their right names, and say to themselves something like this: 'I am filled with tedium and passionate craving. I shall be hard to satisfy, for I am thirsty for a deep draught of human felicity. What I crave is not described or named in the physiologies. I crave beauty, sympathy, sweetness, incentive, perfume, difference, vivacity, wit, cleanness, grace, devotion, caprice, pride, kindness, blitheness, fortitude. I will not look for these things where I know they cannot be found, nor under conditions in which I know they cannot be maintained. But if I find them, and where they thrive, I shall wish to express my joy by some great act of faith and the hazard of all I hope to be. And I shall not like the town clerk to be the sole recorder of my discovery and my faith. I shall wish witnesses, high witnesses, whatever is august and splendid

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 in the order of the world, to enwheel me round and bid me welcome to that order.' That is the sort of self-realization to which I hope our sons and daughters are coming."

Cornelia smiled with a kind of malicious sweetness that she has. She was satisfied. She rather yearned, I perceived well enough, to remark that now at last I was taking the "stand" that she had taken from the first. But Cornelia is one of the few women now living who do not say everything that they yearn to say. She merely released one arrowy smile. Then she rose, as I had done already,—standing, she reminds one of Artemis,—and extending her hand, detained mine with another deep question. She asked me whether I knew any "living reason" to believe that my emancipated young people would return to that ideal.

The opportunity was irresistible.

"Yes," I said, "I have known you, Cornelia."

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was a wedding at noon in the village church, a couple of miles from our summer community by the lake, and as most of our colony were somewhat interested in the girl, we turned out in force. It was an outwardly festive and—to my sense—agreeably solemn little affair. There was a bank of lady's-slippers and maidenhair ferns before the altar, and the air was heavy with the sweetly mortal scent of lilies. The clergyman in white vestments had a full consciousness of the finality of his function. He joined in permanent wedlock a white, smiling, tearful bride of twenty to a well-dressed groom of thirty-five, who looked very experienced, very serious, and slightly bald. Cornelia, who is a connoisseur, whispered to me that it was in every respect a "most suitable match." I made a mental note to ask her at the next opportunity what the essentials of a suitable match were. I happened, however, to ride away from the ceremony in the rear seat of her car, sandwiched between her two children, Dorothy

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 and Oliver Junior; and their comment was less flattering.

"Bah!" exclaimed Oliver. "Let's go and have a swim. It made me sick."

"Me too," said Dorothy. "It made me cold all over to hear her promising to forsake all others and keep herself only for that wizened—stick. Why should she forsake all others, just because she is married? It sounds as if she were going as missionary to the Indians."

"Or as trained nurse to an isolation hospital," Oliver suggested.

"When I am married," said Dorothy, "I shall not forsake all others—at least, unless I get a better one than that."

"You are severe critics," I murmured, secretly delighted to observe that the children were using the dialect of their feelings, rather than that polite language which well-bred youth, like Japanese ladies, employ in presence of their elders. "At what age do you expect to be married, Dorothy?"

"I shall never marry!" she replied with a deep blush. She is of course at exactly the correct age for saying that. But if you haven't seen her, you can have no adequate notion how dire and how delicious that threat is on her lips. She inherits

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 "eligibility" from both her parents. Her mother has a clear, expressive, sunlit loveliness; but Dorothy's beauty has in it an element of subtlety—from her father—and a suggestion of sorcery and peril. She has her mother's complexion but her father's eyes. It is the unexpected combination and contrast that fascinates one: the filleted blond hair and the fluent roses of the fair skin, with the brown eyes, dark yet full of lambent lights—eyes of which the centres seem gleaming paths, leading into shadows where a man might easily wander and be lost.

"And why won't you marry?" I pursued; for as we were driving at a good speed over a rough road, I was sure the watchful maternal ears could not overhear us. And so was Dorothy.

"Oh, I don't like the choice," she said, "that marriage presents—nowadays."

"A choice!" I repeated with irreverent levity. "You haven't come to that yet, I trust. But what do you think the choice is going to be?"

"You may laugh," said Dorothy, "but we all know well enough. We don't have to wait till we have made it, to know what the choice is. It is either a 'good American husband,' ten or twenty years older than you, who has a fine position and

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 a character and nice middle-aged friends, and can give you a home and a social circle and clothes and things—but hasn't anything to say to you. He simply hasn't anything to say to you."

"Why do you keep hollering, 'He hasn't anything to say to you'?" mocked her brother. "Who hasn't anything to say? Who? Who? Who?"

"Shut up!" said Dorothy, with more sweetness than the words can carry. "You heard. I said, 'The good American husband has nothing to say to you.

"That is rather a defect," I assented wickedly, "if you've got to be alone with him for the rest of your life. Yes, it's a rather serious defect in a man with whom, forsaking all others, a girl of twenty expects to spend the next fifty years. But Dorothy, if you don't take a good American husband, what is the alternative?"

"Oh, a boy of your own age, of course," she answered promptly. "A boy that you like—like in all ways, I mean: like his voice, like his eyes, like the temperature of his hands—not like fins. He talks with you about the things that interest you—they are just the same as the things that interest him; and you like to do things with him; and if there is anything perfectly splendid, you wish he

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 were there; and whenever you see him coming, your heart begins to dance."

"Well," I said, "that seems an attractive sketch. Why not choose a boy like that?"

"Because," she explained, "it seems as if nowadays none of the boys that one really likes is ever going to amount to much. At any rate, you must wait till your doddering old age before you can hope to be married—and what's the use then? He won't be interesting to me, and I won't be nice for him—then. But we'll just sit around in padded chairs, with ear-trumpets in our ears, and yell, 'Whadye say?' at each other; and wish it were bedtime."

"I don't quite understand the reason for this postponement."

"If," she said, "they are boys of your own age, and enjoy the books and music that you do, and are nice to dance with, why, then they think they are going to be poets or composers, and so they don't work, and they flunk out of school—and your mother asks you why you persist in playing around with 'that worthless fellow'—doesn't she, Oliver?"

"Yep!" said her brother, and grinned.

Dorothy, leaning across my knees, first pinched,

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 then patted him, and said: "Poor old Ollie! He's nicer than almost any boy I know, and yet Dad says he's a 'worthless fellow,' too."

When I suggested that the only hope was to take one of these nice worthless fellows and put some "starch" into him, the rear seat burst into a peal of conspirant laughter. Possibly that hope had been tried. Cornelia whirled around upon us, and demanded:—

"What are you children talking about?"

I answered sedately that we were discussing education for life, and that there were certain points on which I should like her opinion. But we were now at the clump of Rural Free Delivery boxes, where the path comes down from my cottage. Intimating that I might "drop around" toward the end of the afternoon, I got out, and having handed up Cornelia's mail, walked home with my own. It proved rather piquantly amusing.

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was a light rain at lunch-time, but it blew over, leaving the out-of-doors extraordinarily inviting. After I had written for two or three hours, I found myself walking—and chuckling—up the path through the birches to Cornelia's place. Under the hemlocks near the house, I passed Dorothy, in white tennis-attire with a sketchy sweater the color of California poppies, curled up in a hammock with a book. A young girl alone fills me with awe, like a cardinal building a nest; and I always try to slip past without disturbance—I feel that her mind must be occupied with something beautiful.

"What are you reading?" I called by way of greeting.

"I'm not reading," she replied, "I'm waiting for the young man that mother likes to have me play tennis with."

With an additional chuckle, I proceeded to the front of the house. My original merriment had been occasioned by two letters, in the morning mail, from correspondents at large who desired

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 me to inform them whether Cornelia was "real." I was also wondering how much of these letters I could discreetly disclose to her.

She met me on the threshold of the wide verandah, standing for an instant tiptoe in a practicable yet perfect sylvan costume, and framed between two tall Chinese vases of wild tiger-lilies, which made a little pattern with the glints in her hair and the knot of soft flame at her breast.

"Let's walk!" she said.

"Let's," I replied; and we struck briskly into the abandoned road which runs, carpeted with bindweed and bittersweet, for miles and miles skirting the forest, with only a thin curtain of young silver poplars and birches between it and the lake. Cornelia is a light, crisp-footed walker,—at her gayest walking, and good for long distances,—my only complaint being that she has forgotten how to loiter. She seems rather bent upon reaching the terminus ad quem than careful to let me fall a step to the rear, where I may consider with more detachment how, like a dryad, she expresses and completes the woodland vista.

"I had a letter this morning," I began, "from an unknown lady. It would amuse you."

"Would it indeed?" said Cornelia, moving

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 swiftly forward and at the same time calling my attention to the twittering brown flutter of a tree full of cedar-wings.

"Yes," I insisted, "I'm sure it's as interesting as bird study. This lady doubts your existence. Listen to this." I pulled forth a delicately tinted letter with a faint scent which died among the pungent fresh odors of the rain-washed air. Tell me,' she writes, 'whether Cornelia is real. If she is, I hope you are not in love with her. She is the feminine of Sir Austin Feverel. She has no heart. She is just unfaltering correctness. As a girl, I fancy, she folded her still hands in her lap and calmly waited till her family had consulted the bankers and the genealogists before she decided to care for the man she married. As a woman, she wishes to inspect and authorize every passion before she allows it to peep. I pity her children. She has never done a thing in her life merely because for one rapturous hour it seemed the most desirable thing in the wide world to do. I should hate her.

Cornelia brushed me sidelong with the sweep of her gray eyes, of which the effect, when one catches it so, is like that of the cool rays of a May sun bent to a focus under a burning-glass. But she

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 only said, "What queer correspondents you have! And what a charming impression of me you have given them! Am I as hateful as that?"

It isn't difficult to say complimentary things to Cornelia. The difficulty is not to say them. But I make it a practice not to answer rhetorical questions. They divert one from one's point. "Please remember," I said, carving my accents on the air with my crabtree stick and looking straight ahead, "please remember that this is not my portrait of you, but only the comment of one woman upon the image of another woman reflected in the eyes of a man who has worn spectacles for many years. But I have another letter—from a novelist; he has a quite different theory of you."

"Is it nice?" asked Cornelia, with a demipirouette and the instinctive capricious smile of a very pretty woman about to step before a mirror. "You should tell me something very nice to offset the spitefulness of that horrid person. But what a silly question! Your letter is from a novelist; so of course it isn't nice. Is it?"

"No," I replied, "I'm afraid it isn't nice—in your sense of the word; but it is interesting—in my sense of the word. I call a thing interesting, you see, when it seems to be earnestly pointing in

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 the direction where truth, like a rabbit, has just disappeared in the bushes. Now, this novelist belongs to the large and productive group of hunters who are leaving the highroad to pursue truth into the underbrush. His theory of you is not a personal reflection upon you; it is only part of his general theory of society and human nature."

"Bah! bah! bah!" Cornelia exclaimed. "I'm sick of human nature—their theories of it, I mean. I love people, but I hate what our current writers say about them. Life is so much more decent, when one knows how to live and whom to live with, than any of our novelists will admit. I have the same feeling in the theatre. I go to a play and see nothing in it that can compare with the quality of real experience—if one has any taste and discrimination. But tell me, now, what does this dreadful creature say about me?"

"Well, I'll take the risk," I said, "since you have the courage or the curiosity to insist on it." I pulled out the second letter. "What he says is this: 'I am afraid your Cornelia is not real. For me, at any rate, she doesn't exist. She isn't elemental. She isn't spontaneous. She strikes me as a theoretical construction to please a Victorian grandmother. Or perhaps I had better call her an

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 old bachelor's pipe dream of a lady. One can't write modern fiction from that point of view. It's insubstantial. We realists have been demonstrating now for years that Judith O'Grady and the Colonel's lady are very much alike beneath the skin. We have destroyed the legend of the lady, and we have destroyed the legend of the gentleman. We have put them out of their misery: they don't exist any more. We're just men and women together. If you don't know Cornelia as a wife, you don't know her—you don't know her as a realist. Women are not like her—not inside. Go beneath the surface, and you'll find the Judith O'Grady in Cornelia.

"What nonsense!" cried Cornelia. "What perfect nonsense! Give it to me." And almost snatching the letter from my hand, she tore it into fine shreds, and tossed it showering into a wild currant bush.

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you see," she continued, as we came over the brow of a little hill, "why I can't have Dorothy reading these current novels? I don't wish her to be what this creature calls 'elemental' and 'spontaneous.' I wish her to be civilized and rational—and not a well-dressed little savage, ready to act at once on whatever passion or fancy or circumstances put into her head. I wish her to associate with people who are rational and civilized, and, when she marries, I wish her to marry a man who is civilized and rational. Do you know, that in the course of the last year I have met just one man in fiction who seems to have retained elements of the ideas of a gentleman,—or rather, one man and his father,—I mean the hero of Struthers Burt's The Interpreter's House. As for Mr. Burt's women, they are almost as uncivilized as anybody's."

"Isn't there a season of life," I suggested, "in which almost everyone has some uncivilized promptings?"

"Is there a season in life," countered Cornelia,

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 "when a properly trained person cannot present at least the appearance of discretion?"

"My dear Cornelia," I said, "do you ever glance through those columns in our great national fireside magazines, in which wise old editors converse with their contributors and advise young girls how to catch a man?"

Cornelia smiled, and then abruptly became very firm and grave. "That is it," she said. "That is exactly it—'how to catch a man'! And the dreadful thing is that the tone of our entire popular discussion and our popular literature is just about at that level—as if the mere possession of anything in the shape of a man were so unquestionably desirable that no scruple must be raised regarding his family and social position, his religion and principles of personal conduct, his property and prospects and professional standing. We are becoming absurd in our carelessness about such matters."

"But that," I protested, "is just what makes the beauty of life in America."

"That," said Cornelia, "is what makes American life so ugly—no respect for any of the things that make people respectable, no sense for the substantial basis of social distinctions, no regard for

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 the hedges and barriers behind which one tries to cultivate the flowers of a finer garden."

"That," I said, "is the really decisive evidence of our freedom from snobbishness."

"It is the decisive evidence," said Cornelia, "of our deficiency in taste."

"You lack patience," I persisted. "It is the new social wisdom of democracy."

"It is the new social idiocy of democracy," she replied; "and let me assure you there is none of it in my house. If I lack patience, I possess some experience. I was taught by my mother to be kind and considerate to servants—my old nurse loved me like a daughter. And I was taught at home and in church to be charitable to poor people and ignorant people and people without advantages and without manners. But I was also brought up to believe that a nice girl had better be dead than form a sentimental relationship with one who was not in her class—not a gentleman."

"Don't you think that is—a rather silly and outworn prejudice?" I ventured.

"I certainly do not," she replied. "I think the salvation of a girl is her pride—legitimate pride in her family, her position, her connections. I have conscientiously striven to train my daughter

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 to feel that, so far as her personal fortunes are concerned, common people—that is, vulgar ordinary people—simply are not in the world. Call it snobbishness, if you like; I am proud of it."

"But Cornelia," I said, "can't you concede that in the relation we are discussing, there is something more elemental and imperative than can be governed by such considerations as you put foremost?"

"Yes—to the sense of animals and savages. Yes—to the sense of vulgar and ignorant people. To the sense of what my mother used to call gentlefolk—emphatically, No. To them, there can be nothing more elemental and imperative than just those considerations which distinguish them from the ignorant and the vulgar."

"You yourself have half apologized for the old word, 'gentlefolk, I nagged. "Please tell me what gentlefolk were, or rather, what a gentleman is. Must he belong to the Church and be a member of the militia? For how many generations must he be able to trace his family? How much money must he have in the bank? How much of the Decalogue and how many rules for perfect behavior may he break in a day, without losing caste? Are you quite clear about all this?"

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 "You have a very irritating way," said Cornelia, "of trying to make the most sensible and obvious positions absurd to maintain. But you know I am right. You know that there is nothing absurd in being conscious of the claims of the Church and the State and the established system of morals and manners. You know there is nothing absurd in being conscious of the significance of money in enabling one to take and maintain a position of dignity and influence. A man has no dignity nor influence until he enters relations with the instituted and continuing forms of society. And though silly little girls may think they could spend a happy lifetime 'traipsing' after a gipsy minstrel, a wife knows better. Every married woman knows that a husband without dignity or influence is a perpetual humiliation."

"Very possibly," I said; "but you were going to define a gentleman."

"Why, a gentleman," said Cornelia, "is a man so well bred and so intelligent that he knows what I have just been saying, without being told; consequently he doesn't ask a nice girl to marry him if he is aware that he can offer her nothing but perpetual humiliation. A gentleman is a man whose character has been formed by the standards of

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 civilized and rational people. To him these considerations are so elementary and so familiar that he acts upon them spontaneously."

"Then you would admit," I suggested, a little petulantly, "that what a man is, after he is a vestryman, an officer in the militia, and a property-holder, may have a certain remote bearing on—on the felicity of a marriage, if you think that of any importance?"

"Of course I think that of importance," responded Cornelia. "Don't be foolish. I am discussing the conditions in which felicity begins to be possible. You recall what Henry James says so beautifully: 'The object of money is to enable one to forget it.' In the whole course of my life, I believe I was never before hectored into saying so flatly what the prerequisites of a decent marriage are. But you and your novelist friends—you realists, as you call yourselves—have filled the world with the glorification of merely instinctive and utterly irrational 'matings,' or with childish sentimentality about them; so that now, when I talk with Dorothy about suitable and unsuitable marriages, I find myself obliged to reconstruct for her the very rudiments of common-sense."

I do not consider Cornelia subtle, but sometimes

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 she says the same things that she would say if she were subtle. However, if I was being instructed over the head of her daughter, I did not propose to acknowledge it. "My dear Cornelia," I remonstrated, "do you forget that I am not Dorothy?"

"No," she said, "but I often think you are just as sentimental."

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old road dips here into a hollow, where an extensive thicket of wild roses encroaches upon it and diminishes it to a narrow and thorny footpath. We picked our way through it single-file and in silence. Cornelia, emerging some steps ahead, turned and waited, waist-high behind the briars, smiling—with a rose in her hand and its hue in her face. Suddenly she seemed a long way off—twenty years off. The breeze had brought youth into her eyes if not into her mind. She was very lovely, and I wished the wind might have loosened a wisp—why couldn't it?—of her sunlit hair; but that was too much for the wind. Her own arrangements had been complete.

She fixed the rose in my coat.

"Cornelia," I said, as we footed it again together over the vivid green gloss of dewberry leaves, "You remind me of an old sweetheart of the seventeenth century—who also married a diplomat. I mean Dorothy Osborne. When Temple was courting her, she wrote to him, oh quite delicious letters—one in particular, in which she says she

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 has been crying over the story of Baucis and Philemon. 'Methinks,' she says, 'they were the perfectest characters of a contented marriage, where piety and love were all their wealth, and in their poverty feasted the gods when rich men shut them out.' But in that identical letter she warns her lover that  ' this is the world; would you and I were out on't!' And in the next letter she derides the foolish young people who marry for love, and pointedly reminds poor Temple that all the world must be informed 'what fortune you have, and upon what terms I marry you—that both may not be made to appear ten times worse than they are.

"Yes—yes; I remember," Cornelia said, with—I thought—a faint note of reverie. "Love and wit met in that encounter, and both came away much improved. I must give that book to my Dorothy. She was a sensible girl—Dorothy Osborne was a very sensible girl. It is a book that will help a young girl to understand that she needn't be an idiot."

"At heart," I said, "even the sweetest of women are as hard as nails, aren't they?"

"Someone has to be," said Cornelia.

"You mean," I interpreted, "if the young lovers aren't to make fools of themselves."

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 "Yes," she said, "or old ones, either."

"H'm," I resumed; "what I was getting at was this: when I was a young fellow, with even less experience than I have now, I used rather to revel in reading tragedies and tales of dismally bitter and disillusioned men. All young fellows do. I suppose it intensifies the sense of their own existence. In the presence of dark and disastrous things—sin, crime, murder for love, and so on—they persuade themselves that they are drawing close to the 'throbbing heart of reality.

"Yes," said Cornelia, "you used to like tragedy."

"But now," I said, "I am following an entirely different clue. I have a theory that the only matter that is really worth investigating is happiness. And so I haunt the trails of people who are reputed to be happy, or who act as if they were happy; and I pester them for their secrets."

"An odious habit," she said. "Besides, you won't learn anything."

"Cornelia," I continued,—not solemnly, you understand, but with my lightest touch,—"are you as entirely happy as we all think you are?"

"You don't imagine that I should tell you if I were not, do you?" she said—this also with the light touch. "Of course I am!"

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 "Then I suppose that if I asked you to outline the personal characteristics of, let us say, the sort of man one's daughter should choose in order to have a high prospect of a happy marriage—why, then you would just hand me back a quick sketch of His Excellency, your husband, wouldn't you?"

"Of course I should," she replied without hesitation. "I am proud of Oliver. He has made a place for himself in public life. Men like him—he has hosts of men friends; and his relatives are all suitable people. He has been able to provide amply and even lavishly for the comfort of his family, and has given us the advantage of years of foreign travel and residence. He cares a good deal for appearances; but so do I. He likes to live expensively; but he knows how to live. And he is never, like so many men with careers, too busy to live or to let other people live unless they can be swept into the stream of the monster's ambition. He is never too busy to enjoy what he is doing."

"Astonishing virtue, in the circumstances!" groaned my envy.

"And then he is generous to us all—and reasonably tolerant, and really kind-hearted and sympathetic with people that he likes; and he and the children positively adore one another. I like

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 that in him. His temper has its stormy seasons, but for the most part it is gay; and even when he is very angry, he is rather entertaining. He has so much humor that he seldom bores himself, and so much intelligence that he seldom bores anyone else. Everything in the world and at home seems to interest him vividly. He thinks of something new to do or to say every morning of his life. Whatever man or woman he meets, seems to be the one person in the world that he was hoping to meet at that moment; but I think he actually doesn't care very much for women, except in their purely decorative aspects. Sometimes he is a little exacting, but he is generally appreciative; and he has very, very nice ways of remembering birthdays and anniversaries. And then, in tight places he always does the right thing; in a crisis, one can rely on him."

"Cornelia," I said, clipping a row of flame-weed with my stick, as we quickened our pace, "I have just passed through a terrible minute. You know that Oliver is the only man in the world that I envy. I have been checking off each trait of his against my own, and the only trait that I have in common with this happiness-producing paragon is that my temper, too, has 'stormy seasons.

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 "That's too bad," Cornelia said maliciously, "for I don't consider Oliver's temper his best trait."

"No, nor do I; you omitted the finest virtue of the perfect American husband. What I admire most of all in Oliver is his sending you into the country for the summer—and his sublime confidence that he will get you back again in the fall."

"The quiet is nice here, isn't it?" she said; "but hadn't we better turn about? The sun is slipping into that indigo cloud-bank."

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plunged over the ridge by a steep path to the lake, in order to make the short return by the shore. The wind was now blowing hard and the waves running high. I began to feel like taking it easy, but Cornelia is indefatigable. She drew up her shoulders, threw back her head, drew a deep breath, and went cutting into the wind like a gallant yacht.

"Oh let's slow down a bit," I called. "I've only just begun to understand something. Something very important about happiness. It flashed into my mind—literally flashed—as you struck that Samothracian pace northward."

"If it's as important as that—" she said, relenting a little in her stride. "But don't you like to walk fast? Nothing makes me so happy."

"I have a theory," I said. "One can't walk fast when one has a theory. It's a theory for which you are partly, perhaps mainly, responsible."

"Then it isn't horrid, is it?"

"Oh no! It is very nice indeed. But even now, while we delay, it has grown into three theories. In

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 the first place, there are no perfect husbands, and there is probably only one perfect wife. In the second place, happiness is in neither wives nor husbands, but only in the relation between. In the third place, people who are unhappy in marriage are so, usually, because they don't know how to give themselves to each other. In the fourth place,—it's four now,—that unhappy ignorance is chiefly due to erroneous conceptions of the self."

"Just what do you mean by the self?" she said. "My metaphysical brains are weak."

"Well, the traditional, romantic, and generally popular conception is, that the self is a very deep and precious mystery of 'the buried life,' an elusive being hidden away inside,—always inside,—in a secret garden of the personality, where it murmurs to itself the most delightful and ineffable secrets, which can be communicated to any other self only in a mystical physical fusion of selves—or confusion of selves."

"Yes," said Cornelia, "I understand that. It is something like the religious or sacramental theory of marriage, isn't it?"

"Something like some people's notion of it," I replied. "But please follow this argument. Under the illusion that the self is such a being, and only

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 so to be come at, romantic lovers fret themselves to a fever, and decadent heroes and heroines tear each other to bits, and ignorant contemporary husbands and wives separate with bitter recriminations, each charging that the mysteriously rewarding self sought in the other was not to be found."

"Well?"

"Well, the reason it was not found is that it was not there. There is no such secret garden; there is no such mysterious self to reward the mystics of the romantic quest."

"Don't you think so?"

"No," I said, "I think, up to a certain point, our brutal modern naturalists have followed truth much more faithfully than the poets. And I believe that in educating our young people we had better follow them to the same point. My novelist friend is right in holding to his theory that Judith O'Grady and the Colonel's lady are much the same beneath the skin."

"Bah!" cried Cornelia. "If you say that again, I shall hate you."

"And I shall ask to be forgiven," I said, "and you will forgive me so graciously that I shall sin again. But I'm very serious about this. Judith

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 and the lady are very much the same—beneath the skin."

"I hate you!" Cornelia cried. "I could stick you full of pins."

"Beneath the skin," I continued, "Judith and the lady consist of closely similar metabolic apparatus and so forth, and a certain amount of vacant space—and nothing else. And since the apparatus is the same, there is every reason to believe that it functions in essentially the same way in performing the duties assigned to it by biological destiny."

"You are disgusting," said Cornelia.

"If I dwelt too long on the point, I should be," I agreed. "Viscera and vacancy: that is what Judith and the lady have beneath the skin. And that is why I think the naturalistic novelists are foolish if they dwell too long there."

"Is this your nice theory?"

"No," I said, "it isn't; but it is a sort of basis for my theory. First, we establish the fact that the interesting and precious and desirable self isn't 'inside.' Then, don't you see, it must be outside. Well, it is outside. It doesn't exist till it gets outside. All the differentiation, the distinction, the qualities, which you and I value, are outside and are created by means analogous to the means of

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 art. In so far as people—any people, married or otherwise—really give themselves adequately to each other in love or in friendship, and impart happiness with the gift, they give a self that is externalized, objectified, and tangible—so to speak—in some form of useful or beautiful activity, which occasions no insatiable and consuming fever, but the real joy of benefits given and received and the delight of a loveliness that descends on the contemplative eye like the free grace of God."

"Your theory improves," said Cornelia; "I don't wholly understand it; but it improves."

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foam was now running high up the beach. I splashed straight through it, in spite of my shoes. But Cornelia, lighter footed, danced with it like a partner in some fantastic minuet, returning to my side and my argument only when the creamy gliding meander ebbed.

"A man's power to impart his best self," I said, "depends on the woman's power to receive it."

"Of course," said Cornelia, "all that any man, even a genius, asks of his wife is intelligence enough to appreciate him."

"No," I said, "that isn't true. That is going by. There was a time when a husband thought of himself as the pianist, and of his wife as standing behind him to turn the pages of his music. But nowadays we begin to think that the ideal concert is by two performers on perfectly synchronized independent instruments—not soloist and accompanist but, say, organist and pianist, each as important as the other."

"Nonsense!" said Cornelia, "We shall never expect that. But we do like our accompaniment to

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 be applauded when we play well—and especially when we don't."

"If there is one subject in the world," I said, veering a point, "about which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is women, and what they really like."

"That's quite true," she lilted.

"But I knew a lady once—"

"Still another lady?"

"A most exquisite lady. And I often wondered why, whenever 'the idea of her life' came into my 'study of imagination', I invariably saw her in a setting, as if the setting were an organic part of herself."

"Well it is, isn't it—if one puts a little effort into it to make it right? It is in the setting—isn't it—that one has one's opportunity to express what you call the self. It is in one's husband, children, friends, and one's home and habits and things and so on."

"Yes, but in the case of this lady there was a curious point about the setting. Wherever she was, seemed to be the centre of the picture. She always seemed to frame."

"What an attitudinizer she must have been!"

"She was not. It was only, I think, that she

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 seemed to bring out and accentuate everything near her that harmonized with her own vibrant and articulate life. When I saw her in her drawing-room, it framed her; and she appeared as fine and finished as if she had stepped from a canvas of Watteau's. Her books and pictures and tapestries became as intimately hers as her garments, so that I have felt her almost visibly present in that room, even when she was not there. Sometimes, in a perverse mood, I have said, 'This is all a pose'; and, trying to go behind the elaborate expressiveness of her artificial surroundings and to tease her out of perfection, I have gone on rough walks with her in woods and in the open, half hoping that she might revert to the inarticulate pathos of Nature. But the instant she stepped from the frame of art she stepped into the frame of the landscape; the greensward spread itself before her like Raleigh's cloak; groves offered themselves for a background; and I finally concluded that if she came up out of the sea, like Botticelli's Cytherea, the sea would clothe her and her pearly radiance appear but an extension of the lustrous nacre of some deep-sea shell."

"You are fanciful," said Cornelia.

"I am not fanciful," I replied. "I express just

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 as simply as I can with words my sense of the quite blessed outwardness and availability of this lady's self. I don't think she knew it, but—"

"But that shows how ignorant you are of women," she said, and swept me again sidelong with her gray eyes.

"But whether she knew it or not," I reasoned, "she possesses a secret of communicating happiness—a kind of happiness which I can only describe as pure serenity at concert pitch. Perhaps she was merely born in tune with some fine instrument which the rest of us rarely hear. Perhaps she is right, after all, in thinking of the art and discipline of the traditional lady and the traditional gentleman as the technique by which the true and precious selves of our fellow creatures are most likely to get themselves expressed."

"I believe," said Cornelia, "that your theory is coming out rather well, and in time for tea."

"My only reason for elaborating my theory is, that it is based upon the practice of a lady whose theory is infinitely surpassed by her art."

"Is it, indeed?" she said.

"When I got the theory built, I was planning to say that I should wish a daughter to choose for her husband neither one of the sheik-monsters who of

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 late have been devouring our damsels, nor yet the inexpressive and unmodified vestryman whom you commended to our admiration this morning, but rather a youth who should have a bit of the old bachelor's conception of what might be in the relation—an old bachelor, I mean, who had known in his own youth, an exquisite lady."

"Why lug in the old bachelor?" Cornelia asked—a little cruelly; for we were already at her door.

"Because," I said, as she waited on the step for my leave-taking, "because time and meditation and the naturalistic novelists have convinced him that, almost without a pang, he may resign to Mr. O'Grady and the Colonel the similarities of Judith and the lady, provided only that, from time to time, he may refresh his memory and his senses with the lady's differences."

"Meaning—"

"Why, meaning that the kind of man whom a girl like Dorothy should choose should know that the passion hymned by the naturalists is naught, sheer naught—"

"You really mean that?"

"—in comparison with the quality of love to be had in its high moments of general joyous awareness of the entire radiant life of a fellow

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 being—meeting his perceptions and recorded in his imagination, clothed in color and motion and talk and laughter and fresh air, the head turning with frank gay light in the eyes, the lips parted in speech, while the springing step goes rhythmically over the wide-stretching earth under sunlight and blue heavens."

"It will be a long time," said Cornelia, "before Dorothy needs to trouble her head with that. Meanwhile, we shall occupy ourselves with the rudiments. Shall we see you at mail-time to-morrow?"

"Yes," I said, "and we'll take up Oliver's case, perhaps. There's going to be a fine sunset.  ' Voir!"

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I entered the wood path through the birches that run down to my own cottage, I thought I saw a boyish youngish figure slipping among the trees to the eastward. A moment later, I met Dorothy walking demurely up the path, with a book in her hand, closed upon one finger.

"Watching the sun set?" I asked, diplomatically.

"No," she said, "watching him disappear."

"Watching whom disappear?" I inquired, being invited.

"Oh, a boy that I like. We've been reading one of mother's new books. It's about a girl, Deirdre, who didn't want to marry a king, because there was a boy that she liked very much better—in all ways. And so they ran away and lived in the woods—and died happily."

"Oho!" I exclaimed. "I suspect the happiness of their death has been greatly exaggerated. It seemed to me rather dreadful. It's James Stephens's version, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Dorothy, and turning the golden

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 dusk of her eyes with a sweet young gravity full upon mine, she added: "How old was my mother when you first knew her?"

"About your age, Dorothy. Why do you ask?"

"Was she very different then—from the way she is now?"

"She was quite a bit like you, then," I said, "if I remember. But why do you ask?"

"Because," she said, "she has marked the loveliest passage in this book. And I can't understand why, because she isn't like that now—not at all like that now."

"Isn't like what?"

"I mean," said Dorothy with perfect lucidity, "that this passage expresses just the way this boy and I feel. Shall I read it to you?"

"That wouldn't be quite nice," I suggested, "would it, Dorothy? Good-bye!"

"Perhaps not," she agreed; but as she moved toward the house, she turned and called after me: "But if you want to read it, you can find it on page one-hundred-and-forty."

In my own copy of James Stephens's Deirdre, I have marked, on page one-hundred-and-forty, this passage:—

"Lacking him, what could be returned to

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 her? Her hands went cold and her mouth dry as she faced such a prospect.

"The youth who was hers. Who had no terrors for her! Who was her equal in years and frolic! She could laugh with him and at him. She could chide him and love him. She could give to him and withhold. She could be his mother as well as his wife. She could annoy him and forgive him. For between them there was such an equality of time and rights that neither could dream of mastery or feel a grief against the other. He was her beloved, her comrade, the very red of her heart, and her choice choice."

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always looked with admiring astonishment on parents who have daughters on their minds, and yet are not broken by the responsibility; and next to the weight of immediate responsibility for a daughter I should place the burden, which some mothers still take upon themselves, of choosing a daughter-in-law. In my callous moods, I say that the ordinary run of children make as good matches for themselves as they deserve, and that they had better be left to their own devices. But if I were a parent and had successfully brought up to the "magnetic age" two such delightful children as Cornelia's, I suspect that I myself shouldn't be able to resist attempting to be a Providence to them. Over a daughter, especially, I suppose I should make a particular fool of myself. I should probably try to keep her for the most part like a bird-of-paradise in a cage, and when I let her out, should endeavor to control her flight by "a thread of my own heart's weaving." And I am positive that any youth who presented himself as a

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 candidate for her hand would, unless he were the possessor of incredible perfections, have desperate difficulty in winning mine.

I did feel reasonably competent, nevertheless, to discuss eligible sons-in-law with Cornelia. The young men of to-day are not notably better or worse than the young men of twenty years ago, nor is the problem of choice among them essentially altered. I know a good man when I see him, as well as Cornelia does. But what is a good daughter or a good daughter-in-law nowadays? It is a horrid question. It leads one into the hot air of clashing ideals.

With respect to girls, I admit at once that I am in a state of confusion and uncertainty, and that I may appear to be in a place where the light is dim, not merely because girls, between the period of George Sand and the period of Miss Amy Lowell, are said to have changed rapidly and essentially, but also because in the vast and engrossing literature of this subject I have remained homo unius libri, a man of one book—of strictly limited experience. As I remarked to Cornelia in all humility, only a day or two ago, if there is one thing of which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is women, including

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 girls. If I were suddenly called upon to indicate to a son my notion of the ideal woman for a lifelong companion, I fear that I should not get beyond faltering forth a vague and most likely quite unpersuasive description of the virtues of Cornelia; and he, if he were as acute as I should like a son of my own to be, would doubtless inform me that it isn't the virtues of Cornelia that take me, but her charm, which I don't understand. At any rate, my personal curiosity was so happily and completely arrested by my first discovery of perfection that, in the twenty years which have elapsed since that time, I have never felt impelled to explore any further.

I recall, for example, that when a few years ago I visited England in order to look up the baptismal record of an Elizabethan lawyer, I met on shipboard a vivacious young Frenchwoman who had compassion on my obviously lonely state and proposed one day that we make a couple of constitutional turns around the deck. At the end of the first turn, during which I had dallied a bit with the weather in my ingenious American fashion, she shrugged her shoulders—that is, I suppose she did, for she was very French—and exclaimed, "Allons donc, causons de la

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 femme (Well, now, let's talk about women)!" I had read somewhere or other that Frenchwomen excel in the light discussion of serious themes and general ideas; and if she had proposed that we discuss palæography or epigraphy, I should have been delighted to observe how French feminine wit handles such subjects. But in the face of the topic proposed, I was aghast. I had no intention of talking Cornelia over with a perfect stranger; and feigning dizziness from the motion of the ship, I rather abruptly "saved myself," as the French say, and went below.

It is, curiously enough, Cornelia herself who in these later years is driving me to reopen the subject, investigate it, and "take a stand." I haven't, till lately, felt myself to be in an uncertain position or in a dim light, but rather in a very certain position and at the radiant centre of light. I don't wish to change my stand. Neither, of course, does she wish me to change it. Yet, if I alter, her own inflexibility will have been the prime mover.

It comes about in this way: she goes into the country as religious people go into a retreat—to escape from dusty contacts with the bustling democratic world, to collect her soul, to fortify her principles, and to renew her vows of allegiance

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 to the conceptions of the good and the beautiful which she inherits from several generations of ancestors accustomed to giving the tone to the society in which they lived. It is utterly impossible to think of Cornelia at present as a grande dame—she is too young, there is too much of the morning clinging to her; and I cannot bear to dwell on the possibility of its ever deserting her; yet in the treasonable hours of the imagination I do occasionally steal forward on the straight highway of time, and I can see that, thirty years hence, if she holds her course, if she fulfills her destiny, she will be a beautiful and proud old lady, still giving the law to her children and to her grandchildren—what people call a grande dame.

But the tide of democratic vulgarity is running into the country havens and stealing insidiously into the securest retreats. One's own friends and neighbors are tainted with it. One's own husband brings a whiff of it up from the city at the week-end. One's own children, in spite of all segregation and antiseptic precautions, show a mild infection with it in their speech, in their manners, and even in their tastes. One doesn't compromise with it. One "stands firm"; but one stands ever more and more alone.

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 I admire Cornelia's ability to stand alone against the world, against her own times, and against the practice of the city and the tyrannies of fashion; and, when she is wholly right, as I think she often is, it is the pleasantest thing imaginable for me to stand with her. But I am beginning, at an advanced age, to develop skepticism, and to look with an uneasy skeptical eye upon a rectitude of taste which isolates one too sharply from one's own flesh and blood—such "pure and eloquent blood" as speaks in the faces of Cornelia's children. When she expects me to side instantaneously with her against the budding ferment of her own son and daughter, I hesitate. I reluct, like a man called from the roadside to leave the sweet intoxication of an orchard in May. I become curious and loath to close the windows of apprehension to the rumors and fragrance of another springtime.

On the morning—Friday it was—after our windy walk by the lake, Cornelia, contrary to my expectation, did not appear at mail time under the big elm which shades our little grove of R.F.D. boxes. This was a surprise, because she had virtually agreed to be there and she habitually performs with precision whatever she

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 has agreed to do. Later in the day, however, I learned that her husband had unexpectedly arrived in a hydroplane, with an officer in the naval flying corps, and that he would stay over Sunday, which was Dorothy's birthday. We seldom make calls in our summer community, except, as we say, "on intimation." Accordingly I waited for an intimation. All day Saturday, to my increasing wonder, there was nothing but silence from His Excellency's household, and, in the phrase which high usage has now made classic, "damned little of that." But I quite anticipated a birthday party on Sunday—for Oliver Senior makes much of these occasions—and probably a fire on the beach in the evening, with the latest gossip and best stories of the city. There was no party, and there was no fire.

On Monday I went down my path to the mail boxes with acute curiosity. The carrier's Ford had apparently broken down on the mountain, for he was nowhere in sight. I found Cornelia sitting alone on the bench under the elm; the other pilgrims, weary of waiting, had scattered along the marshy lakeside in search of lady's-slippers, which were abundant this year. She was all in white, and she sat with her bronze

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 gold head leaning against the gray trunk, and with one hand, lying listlessly across her knee, holding her soft white hat. If I were not afraid of being called bookish and pedantic, I should admit that as I approached she reminded me of Ariadne in Naxos; as it is, I content myself with remarking that she seemed a little languid. She did not rise.

I observed the point, because listlessness is not her "note."

"I hoped you would come," she said.

"It's a lovely morning, isn't it," I exclaimed, in a sudden awareness of the truth of what I was saying.

"No, it isn't a lovely morning," she replied. "It's a horrid morning. Come and sit down. I want to be comforted." Looking into her cool gray eyes, I saw that I had been mistaken. It wasn't a lovely morning; there was a cloud in the sky.

"You, comforted?" I said incredulously, and seated myself at the other end of the bench, for I felt my hopeless inexperience with Ariadnes. "I thought you were always happy. Where is Oliver? I heard he came Friday night, but I haven't seen hoof or horn of him."

Cornelia looked out for a moment silently over

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 the deep, still, intense blueness of our lake, mirroring the blueness of the morning sky. I suppose in that rapt moment—I haven't seen her look more purely poetic in years—she was deciding whether it was her duty to tell me a loyal lie or whether she might relax and tell the simple truth. As she was in one of her rare moments of languor, she decided for the truth.

"I am vexed with Oliver. I sent him back to town on Saturday. I told him that I didn't wish to see him again this summer."

"Why, Cornelia!" I cried, "What in the world has Oliver done? Is it proper for me to hear? Has he been flirting with his secretary? Or has he been beating you? Or what?"

"He has been beating me." Cornelia dabbed at the corner of one eye with her handkerchief; and I imagine there may have been some occasion for it, though I did not see it. She held her lower lip for an instant compressed under her perfect teeth. I noticed these things because in twenty years' acquaintance I had never witnessed them before—but once, and that was in the dark backward and abysm of time. Then she smiled faintly and repeated:—

"Yes, he has beaten me. Dreadfully."

"The monster! What have you done to merit

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 blows? You don't look bruised, Cornelia. Now that you have wept, you look like a calla lily after rain."

"What have I done? I have done nothing but try to bring up my children as children should be brought up. And I am bruised and beaten. Oliver has betrayed me. I am fond of Oliver. I am his best friend. Oliver is—Oliver is a good deal of a dear—in his way. But it does seem as if, when it comes to the children, he acted like an irresponsible boy. Oliver is fifty-two. He acts as if he were fifteen, or as if he wished that he were."

"I don't doubt that he does," I said, "and I have always thought that his boyish gusto was a positive element in his charm, and the quality especially which makes his children so fond of him. But tell me, now, what he has done, and I'll try to judge him as he deserves."

Cornelia began doubtfully and far away from the main point, in accordance with the manual of tactics for women.

"Well, first of all," she said, "he came up here in an aeroplane. I have forbidden him to fly. At his age and with his family, he has no right to take such hazards merely to amuse himself."

"Perhaps not," I said, "but you know that you

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 like Oliver because he is the sort of person who does take hazards. If he weren't, you would despise him."

"Of course," she replied. "If there were real occasion for it, I should despise him if he were not the first to risk his life. But he does it now—and these other things, I am convinced—mainly because he knows how much I dislike them. I don't see what possesses him."

"What other things does he do, Cornelia? Oliver is at one of the 'dangerous ages.' And perhaps his children are beginning to influence him. You mustn't forget that Dorothy and Oliver Junior have reached an age at which offspring frequently have a very unsettling effect upon their parents."

"Well, listen. You know how much I dislike what people call 'the modern girl' and all her works and ways?"

"Yes."

"And you know how hard I have tried to keep Dorothy in her old-fashioned sweetness and innocence?"

"I don't see what there is old-fashioned in Dorothy," I said. "But she is sweet. I supposed God had made her so, and that the work couldn't

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 easily be changed, and that all you had to do was to stand aside and watch her blossoming. But since you say that has been a trial, I must believe that you have been tried by it."

"Yes, and so does Oliver—I mean, he knows perfectly that it isn't easy for me to keep the right influences here and the wrong ones away. But what do you suppose occurred to him as the most appropriate birthday present that he could send up here by express to his daughter, the day before he came last week? An expensive knicker-outfit, a handsome cigarette-case, and a big package of his own cigarettes."

"Oliver has to have his little jest."

"Little jest, indeed!" retorted Cornelia almost grimly. "When Dorothy opened the bundle, of course I supposed that Oliver had enclosed the cigarettes for his own use. But Dorothy said, 'No, mother, they are for me. Father promised them to me on my birthday.' She opened the box, and there was a poem from Oliver, addressed, 'To my daughter Dorothy with her first box of cigarettes,' with a lot of rigmarole warning her against the excess of smoking more than one at a time! I thought he had gone crazy, and I was so angry that I snatched the cigarettes and the

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 case from her and threw them into the fireplace."

"If you take the jest seriously," I said, "I don't blame you for being perturbed. I haven't any clear moral principle on this point. Many girls do smoke; and I think we shall ultimately have to concede that smoking isn't a 'sex function.' But smoking and Dorothy don't go together, in my feeling for the fitness of things. It seems like offering snuff to Viola or a Manila cigar to Rosalind. (You ought not to forget, by the way, that those two girls did wear knickers.) But smoking—why, I should as soon think of offering a plug of tobacco to you, Cornelia."

"Ugh! Don't be disgusting," she pleaded.

"I'm not disgusting. I am only expressing my sense of the immeasurable gulf that lies between you and anything of questionable taste. But go on with your story."

"Well, Oliver arrived that night. When I asked him what he meant by the performance, he laughed in that infectious, irresistibly disarming way he has, and said, 'Oh, I have been reading Heywood Broun on the care and nurture of children. The young man has ideas. He thinks the way to equip youth for the battle of life is to gird upon them the sword of early experience, the

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 buckler of knowingness, and the whole armor of sophistication. And I've decided to turn over a new leaf and meet my children halfway. Treat them like equals, instead of like superior beings. Dorothy will learn to smoke next fall, when she goes to college. It may be the only useful thing she will ever learn there. Qui sait? But if she waits till then, she will learn with a parcel of silly goslings who will think it is devilish. Let's try the effect of having her begin now at the domestic fireside with her own father and mother, who don't think it devilish."

I could seem to see a certain reckless experimental method in Oliver's madness—as in the serious proposal of some other reformers for "communal bathing" in the household, as an antidote to precocious sexual curiosity. It was an experiment which I should be willing to have tried on a dog. It had something in common, indeed, with an undeveloped notion of my own on the use of moral antitoxins. But I could also see that Cornelia saw nothing of the sort. So I merely asked, "And what did you say?"

"I said," she replied, "that Dorothy's mother did think it devilish—that Dorothy had never seen her mother smoking and never would. He

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 laughed again and said, 'Then she will never learn to do it like a lady.' I inquired whether he were incapable of distinguishing between what is permissible in a man, perhaps pardonable in his typist, and what is undesirable in his seventeen-year-old daughter. He reminded me that three fourths of the ladies he knows smoke, and that Russian women, French women, and English women can't understand why we make a moral issue of it. I said, 'So much the worse for them. I am sick of having something obviously bad in America excused merely because something obviously worse exists elsewhere.' He said, 'Cornelia, you are a Little American. You are out of step.' And I lost my temper, and exclaimed, 'Oliver, you are a great idiot! Dorothy hasn't smoked yet, and she wouldn't think of smoking now, if she hadn't a fool for a father.

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this was the first and remains the only occasion in my life on which any married woman has ever revealed to me any serious altercation between herself and her husband,—though I have been informed by others that such revelations are not uncommon,—I was astounded.

"Why, my dear Cornelia!" I exclaimed, "that was a fighting word. Was it then that Oliver beat you?"

"No," she answered with a partially reassuring smile, "I wish he had. Oliver sulks when he is angry. I flash out what I feel, and have it over with. Oliver sulks and plots some revenge—some ingenious, horrid little revenge that he knows will make me furious."

I gasped inwardly—if one can do that; but I tried to play the part of the unruffled confessor. I was learning so much that was new to me about happy family life. "Well, what did he do next?" I asked.

"He took a box of cigars and a novel and went up to his room, to bed. At six o'clock in the

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 morning he got up and roused the household, apparently in the jolliest humor, ringing all through the house the big dinner-bell that we use to call the children from the woods. He made Dorothy put on her new knickers, and got the car out, and drove off to town with the children, 'for a lark,' he said. They came back about noon, and drove up to the door, and honked. I went out; and there was Dorothy in her knickers on the front seat with her father, both of them smoking, and Dorothy with her hair—her lovely soft hair—bobbed above her ears, and her neck shaved like a convict's. I could have cried—either with grief or with rage. And Oliver, simply bubbling with joy, called out, 'I've met them halfway, Cornelia darling!' Wasn't he horrid? Wasn't he perfectly horrid? I didn't cry. But Oliver went back to New York by the afternoon train. And now you know why there was no birthday party last night."

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," I said after a moment of intense meditation, "I think—I am not sure, but I think you are making a mistake."

"I am sure!" she retorted. "I am not making a mistake. I know perfectly well what I am doing. I have never been more certain about anything in my life than that Oliver is wrong—utterly wrong. What mistake am I making?"

"You are making the mistake which nine tenths of the good people of our generation are making in dealing with their own children. You are making the mistake of trying to suppress the symptoms instead of diagnosing the disease. Knickers and the rest are symptoms. Of what? You ought to be thinking about that, but you are not. Cigarettes and bobbed hair are flags of revolt. You are interested only in capturing the flags and burning them. But what is the revolt about? That is what you ought to be thinking about; and you aren't thinking about it at all."

"I am thinking about it," she protested. "I am thinking about nothing else. I am not a

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 simpleton. Personally I do abominate bobbed hair and cigarettes, but I am not afraid of them. What I am afraid of is the disease, or the revolt, of which they are the signals. It is the state of mind which goes along with them. It is the precious and irrecoverable things that disappear when these things appear."

"I don't quite follow you."

"I mean the sweetness and freshness of young girls—their bloom. Don't you care, don't you really care, even you—Oh, how shall I make you understand what I feel about the preciousness of the bloom on things, and on boys and girls who have been brought up happily and wisely in the right surroundings! Ever since I can remember I have had the strangest ecstatic sense about everything that has just come new into the world—dewy things, roses and morning glories early in the morning, little bits of babies, a pear tree all a soft mist of white blossoms, the slender little new moon in a green sky low in the west over treetops at nightfall, robin's eggs, just peeped at, in a lilac bush, the rosy-white tips of old grapevines, the silvery mist of plums before they are picked—anything, everything lovely before dust or heat has touched it and before anyone, anyone, has

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 pawed it over. When I was a young girl my heart fairly ached with tenderness for this quality in things—and with a passionate desire to preserve it. When one grows older, the desire doesn't die out; it becomes only intenser, sharper, with years, till it goes through one like pain. And as I was walking over here this morning, I kept thinking of all these things that have it—have the bloom; and of my little Dorothy—who had it, till her own father brushed it off."

Cornelia uttered this speech swiftly and with a kind of soft, eager, glowing sincerity which terribly disquieted my judgment. But I somehow felt that I had slipped into the position of advocate for the rest of Cornelia's family, which stood at the moment in dire need of advocacy. I smothered my instinctive emotional response, and exclaimed:

"Nonsense! What you value in Dorothy can't be brushed off. Bloom is only the transient breath of qualities that extend in her from rind to core, like the red in a blood orange. You are reveling in a mood, or you yourself would recognize that bloom—intactness—is preserved only by unsuccessful, undiscovered, sterile things. If it remains, it becomes a badge of uselessness. It is meant only for a brief seasonal show, which we may

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 enjoy while it lasts; but it is silly to grieve over it. Other beauties follow—the full moon, and birds that break the lovely blue shells to bits and sing. Dorothy is breaking through her shell. That is all."

Cornelia sighed: "If it only were! But you don't know anything about the revolution that takes place in a girl's mind, and in her character, the moment she puts on the badge of those who have ceased to care for 'intactness!

"I'm not sure that I do."

"Well, the next time that you see three girls with bobbed hair and knickers—abominable word!—and with cigarettes in their mouths, edge up to them and overhear if you can what they are talking about: some unmentionable novel, some unprintable verse, some unspeakable ideas of some outrageous 'reformer,' something revolting that is sanctioned in Europe but, alas, has not yet been sanctioned here, some silly 'martyr' who has got into jail for some offence against decency, some crazy girl who has ruined herself as completely as the heroine of the latest novel. Perhaps you will hear them discussing what I overheard a group of our modern maidens debating not long ago—whether if a man and a woman registered

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 at a hotel as husband and wife, the laws of this state would not recognize them as such."

"These are 'strong' topics," I said. "I don't think they are the only topics that girls with bobbed hair discuss, though they doubtless are discussed by girls with bobbed hair—and also by some girls whose hair reaches to their knees. But what you are always forgetting, Cornelia, is that life is full of strong topics. We can't get away from them or keep them from the knowledge of our children, unless we are ready to abolish eyes and ears. At the most, we can only cover them over a little and keep still about them. I think you fall into the same fallacy regarding the conversational discussion of them which you fell into regarding the discussion of them in current fiction. You conceive it an error of the first magnitude to admit the existence of evils which every one knows exist. What I should try to ascertain, if I edged up to a group of 'modern' girls in conclave on these themes, is the point of view from which they were speaking—the amount of common sense which they were bringing to bear upon the vices and follies of their contemporaries."

Cornelia likes the ad hominem form of argument. "If you had a daughter of seventeen," she

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