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 said, "should you enjoy seeing her blow the smoke through her lips and hearing her wisely consider the legal consequences of registering at a hotel under the names of 'John Doe and Wife'?"

"If I had a daughter," I replied cautiously, "I have a sentimental notion that I should like to have one who at the age of seventeen would feel the æsthetic impropriety of smoking, and who at any rate would not feel her nerves on edge without tobacco. But suppose Heaven visited the sins of the father upon the child by giving me a—well, a 'modern' daughter. If my daughter, after emitting the smoke, ejaculated the word 'Geese!' with a good accent, and a clear cool sound of conviction, and a kind of contemptuous remoteness from Greenwich Village problems, why I think I should feel mightily reassured. I should be positively glad to have heard her express her mind on this strong topic. And if tobacco helped her to express her mind, as it helps me to express mine, I might even feel mildly grateful to the tobacco."

"You know you would not," said Cornelia.

"Perhaps you are right. But at any rate, I can conceive of no person more properly subject for satire than a man with the fifth cigar of the morning in his mouth taking up the battle axe to

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 make war against the first cigarette of his wife or daughter."

"You are merely talking for argument. I hate you when you do that. You get so far away from me that I can't talk with you."

"No," I insisted, "I am not talking for argument. I am pleading in behalf of your sex, for equality of access to the good things of life, whatever we may finally decide are the good things. I am pleading for a little moral justice toward your sex, and for the necessity, if there is to be justice, of a little discrimination. You don't seem to discriminate at all among your 'modern' girls. It simply isn't true that they are all discussing suppressed novels and illicit love affairs. Many of them are far more interested in horseback riding, duck-shooting, hockey, golf, or hiking to Yellowstone Park. I am not sure what our girls are going to get out of their political activities; but I know what they are going to get out of their athletic activities. I am an uncompromising and enthusiastic adherent of athletic life for women—not Country Club women alone, but all women."

"I approve of women exercising," assented Cornelia, "if it can be done in a nice way. I don't care for Marathon runners and champion

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 swimmers and that vulgar display of limbs in the newspapers."

"Cornelia," I said, "you use the word 'nice' too much; you overwork it. Your son told me the other day that, whenever he mentions a new girl acquaintance in your presence, you have only one question about her: 'Is she nice?' 'It gets on my nerves,' he says, 'to hear that everlasting: Is she nice?—Is she nice?—Is she nice?—till I don't care whether she is nice or not; and I feel like saying, No, she is horrid; but she sings like an angel, and she dances like a wave, and she makes a sparkling quip, and she has brains of her own, and she is attractive, and she is reasonable, and she is a good sport, and she doesn't squall when we get caught in the rain. I don't go around asking girls whether they are nice. How should I know? Mother means well and is perfectly fine herself, and all that. But somehow, you know, it strikes me as kind of nasty for a fellow to be always thinking whether a girl is nice.' And there, my dear Cornelia, you get a bit of the spirit of the younger generation, which is, I think, essentially sounder and healthier than the perpetual incensing of 'purity' by some earlier generations."

"In what way is it sounder and healthier?"

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 "Why, I mean that it isn't the presence of sexual characteristics and impulses in an adolescent or in an adult that renders him or her 'not nice.' That is a part of nature and of humanity. What is not nice is perpetual preoccupation with these impulses. And perpetual preoccupation with them results from isolation with them, and exclusion from anything else of equal or superior interest. I am convinced that many of your 'modern' girls are discovering that fact for themselves. And it is because they dread the bondage and guess the degradation of confinement to a single instinct—it is because of this that they are groping so eagerly for other interests. For many of them, bobbed hair and cigarettes are signs that they are filling and freeing their minds with advertising, real estate, journalism, medicine, law, field geology, geographical exploration, and political organization."

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that the sort of woman that you would have married," said Cornelia, "if you had married?"

"Let us not discuss the woman I would have married. Or rather let me remind you of this about her: the reason why the woman I would have married decided not to marry me was her clear-eyed perception, after some tears and emotional stress, that love was not enough to live on: that what I could offer her was not enough to make up a life for the many-sided being that she knew herself to be."

I paused a moment for a response. But Cornelia kept silence, looking out over the blue water. I continued:—

"If a girl is so placed in the world that she can find expression for the versatility of human nature in a really satisfactory domestic life and really satisfactory society and luxurious travel and beautiful surroundings and the fine things in literature and art and the rearing of really superior children—why, then she may not be tempted at all by advertising and real estate. But can't you

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 see, Cornelia, that for the immense majority of girls the only way of getting anything but their conjugal and maternal capacities valued or expressed, and the only way of getting even their feminine charms to a suitable market lies through some such avenues as I have mentioned?"

"Yes," said Cornelia, "I know girls are going in for these things more and more; that is why I am so much worried about my son. I don't want him to become interested in that sort of girl. She wouldn't make him happy. She wouldn't be a good wife for him. Yet, just now, he seems to have a mania for 'girls that do things.' I know it's the fashion for girls to 'do things' nowadays; but don't you hate to see them doing them?"

"I truly do not. I admit that 'careers' for women are still in a more or less experimental stage. But the results from the ancient experiment in keeping women out of careers are all in. I am curious to see the results of the more recent experiment. Professional men, as life wears on, come to look upon a career, with all its burdens, as literally the one indispensable element, without which existence would be intolerable. For ages, men have lied to their sweethearts; have

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 deceived them into thinking sweethearts and wives are the indispensable elements in the happiness of men. But it really is not so."

"Oh, isn't it?"

"No. And the girls themselves are finding it out, and are very sensibly claiming a share in the substantial satisfactions of life."

"You have no imagination. You don't understand. It's so simple, so perfectly simple. Substantial satisfactions for men are not substantial satisfactions for women. That is all there is to it. The things that please you and fill your lives are sawdust to us—after the first novelty wears off; and they leave our hearts aching and burning. I am certain there isn't a mature woman in business who wouldn't admit, if she were honest, that if the choice were open, she would choose even a moderately successful marriage in preference to a brilliant success in business. They are making a mistake—such a mistake. I am sure that, in their hearts, they know from the outset that it isn't what their hearts desire."

"About the hearts of young girls," I admitted, "I know next to nothing. I am still curious about them because I have heard so much about them. But the only occasion on which I ever asked a

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 girl for her heart, she gave me a stone. And I believe that, far oftener than most men suspect, the place in the pectoral cavity of women assigned to the heart is occupied by some far harder substance. You remember that lovely creature in Balzac whose lover overheard her in solitude exclaiming, 'My God! O my God!'; and the words seemed to him to come from the uttermost depths of her heart and made him love her more passionately than ever, till he learned that she had merely been anxious about her stock speculations—and that the deep suspiration really came from the woman's purse."

Cornelia was not impressed by this reference to Balzac. She has a capable business head herself, and manages her property, which is considerable, with more judgment than her husband displays. She ignored the malice in my speech and merely remarked:—

"A nice woman need not be a fool in money matters."

"No," I continued, "and many of them aren't. That is why I believe many of them are not making a mistake but following a real vocation when they turn to business. I don't know much about their hearts, but I have had extensive oppor-

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 tunity to observe their brains, and, in some respects, I am tremendously impressed by them."

"Oh, we have some common-sense among us," she agreed.

"It isn't common-sense so much," I corrected, "in which girls excel. It is a special faculty of their sex, a kind of darting velocity of mind, which men of other races, the Jews and the Chinese, for example, display more abundantly than Anglo-Saxon men. In manual deftness, in celerity of apprehension, in executive readiness, in a kind of swift practical insight, in flying straight to the point, girls and young women are proving dangerous competitors. They remind me of turtle doves, which, you know, have two very different notes. They coo and coo in the woods, till you think that a mournful amorousness is all they are good for; but if you start them up, they go 'piet, piet, piet' at ninety miles an hour to their next destination."

"Oliver is quicker than I am," said Cornelia, whose generalizations on the virtues rest largely on observation of her own family, "but Dorothy is quicker than her brother; and I am quicker than you are. Yes, I think you are right. Girls are quicker. But quickness isn't very important in

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 itself. The important thing is to know where one is going."

"Girls show," I proceeded, "very many of them, what the advocates of mental tests recognize as officer quality. I suspect that, if the draft were made universal, and if the army tests were applied to all the women in the country, not only would the disgrace of our moron percentage be greatly abated, but ninety-nine per cent of the men would be obliged to serve in the ranks. Among women, there is an immediacy of reaction to stimuli, a freedom from dubitation, subordinate considerations, and inhibiting afterthoughts, which make them invaluable members of a General Staff, when the General Staff is infested with doubting Thomases, Hamlets, and authorities on red tape."

"If you think that," inquired Cornelia, "why don't you, and why doesn't Oliver, give more attention to what I tell him is right?"

"Because," I replied, "we are harassed by subordinate considerations and afterthoughts. But that is just what makes women want to get their hands on things and manage them. I am astounded every day to discover in how many big businesses and even political organizations there

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 is some woman, who has perhaps risen from a stenographic position, sitting in with the chiefs of the concern at the centre of the web and actually telling the 'big wigs' what to do—actually ruling the whirlwind and directing the storm."

After this speech, I glanced at Cornelia to see whether she would admit to herself her own master passion, her suppressed desire. I could see that she was doing something which she ordinarily would no more think of doing in my presence than of doing up her hair: she was reflecting.

"Possibly," she conceded.

"Not possibly," I pursued, "but certainly. All women crave mastery, beginning with the government of their own husbands; and their happiness, after the first feigning delight of amorous surrender, is to extend their jurisdiction, to enlarge the limits of their empire. It is the quality that makes queens. It is the quality that made Elizabeth and not Burleigh the ruler of England, and Catherine, not her minister,—whoever he was,—ruler of all the Russias. It is a quality which you yourself possess, my dear Cornelia, in abundance, only you haven't an adequate throne to display it on; and so, instead of sending Raleigh to South America for galleons of treasure or telling the

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 president of your company which railroad to buy next, you have to take it out in sending Oliver back to the city in disgrace because he has had Dorothy's hair bobbed."

"How I hate him!" cried Cornelia, as if still nursing the bitterness of defeat.

"Really?" I asked, in a momentary flutter of hope.

"But if queens feel as miserable as I do," she added, "since I have had to discipline him, I don't wish to be a queen."

"You have no choice," I murmured.

"But here comes the mail," she exclaimed, rising suddenly and putting on her hat. "Come! Let's go and meet it."

My secret hope sank like a stone into cold depths of resignation.

"All right," I assented sadly; "but why such eagerness for the mail this morning?"

"Why, I am hoping," she lilted, "I am hoping, of course, for a letter from Oliver, you idiot!"

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smooth order of Cornelia's life was interrupted on New Year's Eve by a distressing occurrence which I—which all of us who possess a rudimentary sense of tact—insist on calling an accident. It was not the sort of thing that I had ever thought of as likely to intrude upon the felicity of that household. My own convulsive unuttered response to the shock was: "That it should have happened to them!" But as it, or something very like it, actually happens every day,—once, twice, three times a day all through the year in every big city,—there was really no reason for assuming that they would remain indefinitely immune. The circumstance which seemed at the moment to point the accident with a piercing significance, a chilling personal meaning for us, was, I suppose, the mere coincidence that we were arguing in the abstract about just such occurrences when the brutal reality of the thing burst in among us with the effrontery of a bandit in a Pullman car. Of course it admits of the natural explanation which I shall give, leading up

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 to the mishap in the order of my own approach.

Cornelia spends the winter months in the city, in a desirable apartment near the lower end of the Park—an apartment so spacious and so desirable that an old New Yorker once amused himself at my small-town ideas by asking me to guess the annual rental. As her children, Dorothy and Oliver Junior,—the centre of her summer solicitude,—are at their preparatory schools except during the holidays, she devotes this season to her women friends, to her husband, and to her husband's friends. I group in this way the people whom she entertains, first, because she has no men friends who are not her husband's friends, and, second, because her husband has an endless string of interesting official and unofficial personages whom he gets up—or brings up—from Washington for conferences or for exhibitionary or other mysterious diplomatic purposes.

As an ancient admirer—to put it discreetly—who has sunk through the incalculable accidents of life to the level of an educational counselor or referee, I confess that I find Cornelia just a shade more perfectly herself in the country, where she is comparatively alone with the children and nature and her books, than in the city, where, on

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 my occasional expeditions, I see her but seldom and then usually so beset with husband, friends, and personages that there is little opportunity for the long educational tête-à-têtes of the summer. Of these conversations, be it admitted once for all, the secret excitement is in listening for the occasional lilt of Cornelia's lyric youth amid the finished certainty and assurance of her later manner. Her own mature authoritativeness I can deal with in a fashion and even relish; but in the winter, in the daily proximity of her husband, she has an intolerable habit of throwing out flying buttresses, of quoting Oliver—"Oliver says," and so forth—as if she were referring a country lawyer to a decision of the Supreme Court. It is a little painful.

Still, in the winter holidays I like to call on the two of them in their own characteristic setting, for a variety of reasons which will be obvious enough to all those provincials who spend the gray season quietly sitting in silent, snowbound prairie towns and villages, dreaming, like waifs in a Scandinavian fairy tale, of the bright commotion of crowded streets and thronged foyers and Duse and Pavlowa and grand opera and Conrad and Lloyd George and Swinnerton and windows full of

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 new books and golden gowns and cut flowers. I remember once remarking to them, after they had taken me into one of their theatre parties in the grand style: "Art for the upper classes; morality for men of moderate incomes; religion for the poor." "No"; retorted Oliver, with his instantaneous eye for the weak spot in my armor: "Art for the cities; morality for the towns; religion for the villages."

We provincials are, it is true, fairly well disciplined to the stoic "apathy"—a kind of cultivated hardening of the heart towards everything beyond the reach of our hands and the range of our eyes. Through month after month the rosy knuckles of temptation may knock on our hardened hearts in vain. But recent investigation proves that under constant percussion and strain the hardest substances yield: steel girders buckle, flywheels burst, and bridges wear out and give way to a malady known to science as "the fatigue of metals." An analogous malady, attacking even the most firmly tempered of hearts, accounts for the popularity of Charles Lamb's "moral holiday," that excursion from the moral macadam which nowadays we call a detour. It explains, too, in my own case, the sharp nostalgia for the city which afflicts me

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 annually on the depressing morning after Christmas. On that spiritless day-after, I feel like a camel that has ruminated on its last cud and can no longer batten on the desert and the west wind. I feel like a wretched silkworm in a glass jar, which will swiftly perish of inanition if not supplied with fresh mulberry leaves. That explains why I pack my bag and, by the first Limited train, creep to the city, under the pretext of reading a paper before one of the learned associations.

What I am coming to is the rather curious fact that the attraction of Cornelia's winter establishment is perhaps due less directly to her than to her husband, and to the refreshing and—for me—delightfully relaxing air of worldliness which circulates around him. Cornelia wonderfully incarnates the Eternal Feminine, which is supposed to draw us upward. But in the interim between Christmas and the New Year's Resolutions one doesn't desire to be drawn upward. All one wants is to escape from ennui and suffocation. In the colloquial idiom of our section, one "wants out." And Oliver, in the negligee of old acquaintance, is a most agreeable, realistic, and sometimes rather witty Mephistopheles, letting one out of conventional and cloistral habits of thought,

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 and leading one by sharp detours into the heart of things as they are. Clearly, I don't dislike Oliver: I envy him, and, like his other familiars, call him "Excellency," a title which I believe few persons except the Governor of Massachusetts have any right to use officially. Nor do I think that Oliver really dislikes me: he pities me, and calls me "Professor," a title which he has also conferred, in my presence, upon the learned Greek who polishes his shoes. I tell him that both the Greek and I have a better right to our titles than he, for Oliver is now writing his reminiscences of the war, and has at present no official Washington connection whatever, busy as he seems to be there.

I envy him the variety of his life, the interest and importance of his personal relations, his position inside the façade of public affairs, his understanding of the huge subterranean dynamos which operate the puppet-show of politics, his familiarity with the little hairsprings which govern the dynamos, his chatter of Wall Street and the Departments and the Legations, and his inexhaustible stock of unpublished anecdote. In public he has had the reputation of a strong team-worker, a sound administrative man; and in the newspapers he passes as a champion of the

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 common people, friend of the farmer and the laboring man, and the rest.

But twenty-five years of more or less public life have not stereotyped his mind. In private, indiscretions bubble from him like water from a spring. He utters the most profane and contemptuous condemnation of major enterprises of his party. In a friendly circle he will even repudiate, with perfect recklessness, the "asininities" to which he has been constrained by various public considerations to subscribe. I twit him on the essential duplicity of the official character. I call him what he seems to my academic sense to be—"a tough little Yankee crab apple, coated with the wax of European diplomacy"; "a hard-shelled individualist steeped in Nietzschean philosophy and merely dipped in democratic shellac." I insist that there is no more milk in him than there is in a billiard ball; and that he values the plain people as a professional golf-player values his caddies.

In revenge, Oliver blandly replies: "The only trouble with you professors is that you know absolutely nothing about life"—a charge which I always admit; and then pump him for information. He responds with the—I think—sincere conviction, shared by many Eastern statesmen,

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 that we Mid-Westerners are of an unsubjugated alien race, ominously multiplying within the borders of the otherwise United States, and mainly occupied with the propagation of miscellaneous fanaticisms. He has not yet forgiven me "the pacifism of the Mississippi Valley when the seaboard was aflame." He ascribes to me the "bolshevism" of North Dakota, and is always inquiring solicitously: "By the way, how did you come out with your investments in the Dakota bonds?" Sometimes he pretends that, as I am from "Puritan Kansas," I may have scruples against breakfasting with them "on the Sabbath"; if I accept, he turns to Cornelia and gravely warns her not to forget "the Nebraskan's grape-juice." Or he will ask my permission to light a cigarette, remarking, "As you are from Utah, I feared it might be offensive to you." His mocking compassion is often excited by my provincial residence and by my profession. I don't mind his designating me as "Pascal," nor his reference to my correspondence with Cornelia as Les lettres provinciales. But, in one of his sharper moods, I remember his saluting me as "Calpurnia." I asked him to enlarge a little on the idea. "Oh, it's nothing," he replied, "only I hear that nowadays they are

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 dismissing all the men from university faculties and manning them with Cæsar's wives—with persons 'above suspicion.' I always think of you professors as Cæsar's wives."

Cæsar's wives? Oliver's immediate implication, I suppose, was merely that the public expects on the part of instructors of youth a quasi-priestly character, a many-sided and inhuman exemplariness of opinion and conduct such as neither the youth in our charge nor their parents require of themselves. But Oliver meant more than that. He meant to suggest the absurdity to the realistic mind—the practical invalidity—of the entire professional and schoolmasterly point of view, and the Utopian insubstantiality of our ethical and social vision. Cæsar's wives! The sting of that quip, which he planted in me last summer, was still rankling a bit on a gray hungry morning a few days after Christmas, the poison of it being its truth; and a doubt was stealing insidiously into my mind, like the snake into the Garden of Eden, whether perhaps the influence of the secular priesthood over the democracy might not be greater if the priesthood abandoned its attempts to appear so supremely untouched by the gross human infirmities of the democracy,

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 when I received a note from Cornelia, and, half an hour later, a telegram from Oliver. Like all government officials and even private citizens who have much breathed the air of official Washington, Oliver scorns the post office, even for personal correspondence. For brevity's sake, I give the telegram:—

I packed my old suit into my old suit-case, slipped into my inside pocket the old club-paper which was to pay my expenses, snatched a book of Gilbert Murray's to read on the train, and crept slowly eastward on the Limited. My diary shows that my occupations during my first forty-eight hours in the city were about as follows:—

Read my paper, "A Much Higher Education," before the Saturday Afternoon Club. Cornelia was present and I spoke with her for two minutes afterward. Saw Cyrano Saturday night and college friends in the stockbroking business for three hours following. Slept Sunday morning

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 till cathedral service. Lunched with a poet in the baking-powder business who read me his free verse on an affair between a Jewess and a Chinese laundryman. Spent the afternoon looking at the pseudo-Rembrandts in the Metropolitan, and the evening at a concert. Saw journalistic friends downtown Monday morning. Afternoon; at rehearsal of a Little Theatre play called "Self-Realization"—lively. Publishing friend at his club till six: showed me manuscript of "Petronius Enamored" and put his collection of suppressed novels at my disposal. Walked in Riverside Park till seven, then went to hotel and dressed for dinner. As I was leaving for the West on the 2.37 in the morning, I packed my bag, and checked out. Oliver and Willys might want to talk till daybreak.

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leaves! These details I include in order to indicate briefly how I reduced the unmannerliness of my provincial appetite before I put in my appearance at Oliver's, and, leaving my bag at the office, went up one flight to their apartment. I don't like to seem too eager.

As I stepped into the clear soft blueness of the candlelit apartment, Cornelia rose, a silvery shimmer, from the settee where she had been chatting with Oliver Junior, and, approaching with Artemisian stride, greeted me with her finished graciousness. The artistic perfection of it might subtly pain a sensitive heart, were it not for the intimate reassurance imparted by the rippling overtones of her voice, which resolves art into intoxication and curiously persuades a man in evening dress, in the heart of the city, that he is standing in the midst of a garden full of flowers. I muse.

Cornelia swiftly explained that Oliver Junior, though festively attired, would not dine with us. That spirited and well-groomed youth would, in

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 a few minutes, drive his sister and two of their friends to a young people's party in Scarborough. After I had asked him a few banal questions about his school, a topic which did not appear greatly to "intrigue" him, he edged into the adjoining room and diddled with the piano till his sister Dorothy skipped in, looking like an adolescent Bacchante,—she is a little over seventeen,—and they disappeared together.

Cornelia in the meantime had also explained that Oliver Senior was in the library with Vernon Willys. "I don't like him much," she added, "in fact, I think him rather horrid. He is very happy to-night over his separation from his wife. He could hardly wait to get inside the door to tell us about it. But I believe you have discovered something precious in his books, and Oliver seems infatuated with him. They have been running around together all the fall. He is doing a political novel now, and I accuse Oliver of sitting for the portrait of the hero. But here they are."

The two men came in from the library with red buds in their buttonholes. Oliver as usual saluted me with a volley of questions, which he gave me no time to answer, and with an animating smile, in which I always feel a slightly satirical

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 edge. Willys, whom I had met once or twice before, nipped my arm, smacked his lips, and murmured with a communicative flicker in his eyes that I must be sure to see His Excellency's library before I left. As we moved toward the dining-room, Oliver's quick fire continued: "Did you get my telegram? Get the point about Bacchus? I'm feeling the pulse of the country on this prohibition business. Willys here has convictions, I find—just as many convictions as you have, but different. I got you two together in the hope of hearing you beat each other's brains out. I hope you'll do it in good style. Give him the Mid-Western gospel. I'll hold the coats. I've arranged the proper setting. But be human, Professor! Be human—just for to-night!"

It is not my intention to describe the dinner in detail. The excellence of a dinner à quatre, for any but a quartet of gourmands, is merely to provide a soft-footed ministration of successive felicities to the appetitive nature while the higher faculties, stimulated by the æsthetic accessories of the feast, nimbly engage in the discourse of reason. Of the material details, my memory is as indistinct as an impressionist poet's. I recall only the tall silver of candlesticks on an immacu-

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 late whiteness which was doubtless linen; and a soothing greenness which may have been holly; and a dark rich redness which was certainly roses; and a fragrance, mingled, various, which was partly roses and partly, well, I sat at Cornelia's right hand, and in that dazzling proximity—she carries her head so proudly that Time has hardly ventured to touch a wisp of her bronze-gold hair or to breathe near her shoulder—in that proximity I did not notice, honestly did not notice till some seconds after we were seated, that in front of each plate was a half-moon formed of three delicate glasses, glowing with candlelight reflected from the varicolored souls of old vineyards.

Vernon Willys quite audibly drew in his breath, which after the visit to His Excellency's library was a discreet enough thing to do with it. Oliver, glancing at me, repeated: "Remember, Professor—be human." Then he raised his ruby-colored glass toward the novelist and said: "Let us drink to the death of Bacchus." The two men clinked and instantly drained their glasses. Cornelia lifted hers in my direction, just touched it with her lips, and then replaced it in the semicircle. I was thinking of Ben Jonson's old song, that Anacreontic thing about the thirst that rises from the soul. But what

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 I did with my glass, since whatever I did would grievously offend many persons' notion of the right thing to have done, I absolutely refuse to disclose. That point is of quite subsidiary relevance.

The thing which engaged my attention as a Mid-Western ethicist and one of "Cæsar's wives" was not the content of the glasses nor the number of times they were filled by the chocolate-colored Caribbean cupbearer. A person of my long practice in the ascetic philosophy actually doesn't much attend to these matters. I merely—let us say—became aware of Oliver's Machiavellian plot to seduce me. Then what leaped to my sense as worthy of exploration was just the personal feeling, the intimate private attitude of my friends, of precisely this sort of people, toward the ethical question, or complex group of questions, which the alleged death of Dionysus and his active posthumous life have forced into the foreground of our consciousness. In my own circle at home no one ever says anything of the faintest interest on the subject. When it is mentioned, there may be some talk of law-enforcement; but the heart of the matter is regarded as perfectly dead. Here, there was willingness and desire to discuss the original question.

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 His Excellency, I knew, had publicly advocated the passage of the obnoxious measure, and had recently given to the press a "strong" statement on the necessity of enforcing the law. In the intimacy of friendship, however, and in the circumstances which he himself had arranged, that was only a provocation to my remarking, as he set down his glass:—

"It is obvious that you support the Eighteenth Amendment with reservations."

"With a diplomatic reserve," he corrected, chuckling. Willys, who had penetrated the "reserve," laughed. And Cornelia, crushing a smile between her lips, entered into a rather needless explanation, of which the intention, I perceived, was to dissipate any uneasiness which a Mid-Western Puritan might be conceived to feel on his abrupt introduction to a wet New Year's Eve.

"Monsieur"—meaning Oliver—"is a little naughty," she said, "and he likes to make himself appear worse than he is. You must remember that he is practically a European."

"Oh, nonsense!" I exclaimed. "Oliver a European! Then so was Andy Jackson."

"Yes," Cornelia insisted, "his tastes and habits

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 were formed in the earlier part of his life, when he was almost constantly abroad. His best friends in Washington are men in the legations who aren't obliged to adopt our reforms. Naturally, when he entertains them here, he doesn't wish to seem inhospitable or absurd, like poor dear Mr. Bryan. We don't ordinarily have wine on the table for our own guests—I mean outside the semiofficial connection. But just for to-night, as it's a holiday, and one of you is a pilgrim from the Mid-West, Oliver thought—we thought—that you would appreciate it if ambassadorial privileges were extended to you."

"I get the point perfectly," I said; "that's Oliver's point of view—or one of his points of view. But please let Janus defend himself. He will need practice before we Puritans are done with him. But now that the theme is before us, Cornelia, won't you give us the benefit of your own point of view?"

"My point of view?" Cornelia smiled her Mona Lisa smile. "I—oh, I am Oliver's wife!"

"I have often regretted that," I replied with a consciously provincial affectation of urban daring; "but knowing your strict old-fashioned convictions about marriage, I stifle my regrets.

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 I can't quite reconcile your indulgent humor this evening with your rigorously prohibitive principles regarding—well, the moral fluidity of such novels as Willys writes. I had hoped that your conservatism, your Puritanism, as they call it, on the marriage question would bring you around to our position on prohibition, and so, in that respect at least, detach you from Oliver."

"You are dead wrong, Professor," Willys interjected, "you are muddled. Prohibition isn't conservatism. It is radical innovation. It isn't Puritanism. As you yourself have admirably demonstrated, the Puritans drank like fishes. I am a Puritan. So is His Excellency. We are Conservatives. So is our hostess."

"Your don't read my articles, Willys," I said, "as carefully as I read your novels. What I demonstrated was, that the Puritan is a radical innovator. The Puritan of our day says, 'Let the dry land appear.' You are not a Puritan; you are a Fundamentalist. You wish to return to the Flood. You are a Diluvian."

"Now you are at it!" cried Oliver gleefully. "Go to it!"

"Excuse me," I objected; "we haven't heard Cornelia's point of view yet. I was about to say,

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 when Willys broke in, that we educators don't attach any great importance to the opinions of disillusioned politicians and satirical novelists—cynics like you and Willys. The national culture is in process of fundamental change and regeneration; and you belong to an order that will soon be obsolete, with none to mourn its extinction. The future of the country is in the hands of the young people and such of the rest of us as keep up with them. I am totally indifferent, Cornelia, to what you think of prohibition as His Excellency's wife. In that capacity I doubt if you think at all; you merely accept the situation. I am curious only about your attitude as a parent of the new order, as Oliver Junior's mother. Won't you, for example, psychologize—analyze your feelings and tell us just why you kissed the glass and set it down untasted?"

A hint of rose—pride or some deeper emotion—appeared in Cornelia's face when I mentioned her son. He is her religion—the substance of it. Her husband is the church which she attends from old habit, repeating her belief in him with her lips, like the phrases of an ancient creed. But what she really believes in, with a fervor of prayer and faith, is her son. I suspected that

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 Willys and Oliver would think me guilty of bad taste for bringing into the conversation a subject, as a Restoration hero remarks of his wife, "so foreign and yet so domestic." Somehow children seem out of place when one is celebrating a moral holiday! But if one wishes to break down the guard of a woman who says, "My point of view? I—oh, I am Oliver's wife!" one must risk bad taste. Cornelia's voice glided softly from gay to grave as she answered:—

"I kissed the glass for auld lang syne. I set it down untasted for the sake of the new times and the children. I used to enjoy it, as I used to enjoy being twenty years old. It isn't much to relinquish, is it?—compared with what one has to relinquish."

When Cornelia talks in this vein about age, she seems to me—well, just ravishingly young; and I murmured, for our angle of the table only, "You've relinquished nothing!" But she completely ignored me and continued:—

"As my son's mother, I am very happy, under present conditions, to know that he doesn't drink or even feel any temptation to drink. We refrain, my son and I, more as a matter of taste than as a matter of conscience. Besides, he is too

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 young. In my own home the boys had a glass of wine on their twenty-first birthday as a part of the family celebration. And the girls—I can't remember that I tasted wine, except in Italy, till after I was married. Oliver is only nineteen. If, when he is of age, he is at Oxford, as I hope he may be, or if he were able at home to have his wine in a natural atmosphere, simply and innocently, with gentlemen, I should not wish to deprive him of what I was brought up to regard as a proper element of social festivity."

"Bravo!" cried Willys.

"But, alas," she concluded, "all that is gone now. And it's all so furtive and mean that I have a horrid feeling. And one hears so many hateful stories about the secret drinking of mere boys and girls, at school and at their parties, treating one another in their cars by the roadside,—and the consequences of it,—that it's odious, just odious. And I—I just sigh a bit for the age of innocence, and bid it all adieu."

"Admirable speech!" cried the novelist, as the Caribbean attendant refilled his glasses. "Beautiful speech: full of sweet reasonableness—all but the conclusion. But why adieu? Why turn down the empty glass? You fill me with lyrical

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 melancholy. 'Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go?' You look too steadily on the small dark side of the question. There is a soul of goodness in things evil. Watch and wait! I maintain that the prohibitionists builded better than they knew: they have driven drinking out of the barroom and are bringing it back to the home, where it belongs, and where as Burke says—doesn't he?—it loses all its evil by losing all its grossness, or something like that. You and His Excellency are performing a service to posterity by preserving through this destructive period the purity of a fine old tradition."

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to Oliver. "Oliver," I said, "you have been shielded by your wife. Now Willys is apologizing for you. Really, you know, this won't do. You will have to come into the open and speak for yourself. When I go home, my friends will expect me to give them some intelligent account of what is going on here beneath the surface of things. We sit out there among the cornfields with our radio sets and listen to Washington uttering austere words about enforcing the law, and the next morning we read in the papers that there has been a party under the shadow of the Capitol, and that there is no one to see that the law is enforced, because all the responsible people are busy putting away their private stocks. Slanderous, no doubt. But in the ethical sense, how—actually—do you get away with it? Janus, explain yourself."

"Oh, very well, Calpurnia," said Oliver, "yours to command, remembering only that, as Judge Black informs me, what a man entrusts to the wife of his bosom 'in the sweet confidences of the

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 midnight hour' she is not permitted to bring into court against him. But shall I explain myself as a friend of the government, or as the master of my private life? As an ornamental pillar of the administration, or as the captain of my own soul? Which shall it be?"

"Both, by all means!" Willys exclaimed. "First one and then the other. First the marble bust and then the man. First the friend of the aspiring people and then the friend of the downtrodden artist. Discuss your public betrayal of your own class and then your private loyalty to the good old cause. But tell us first why you passed the Eighteenth Amendment. I can't write my next chapter of Senator Jones till I have an authentic hunch, the vraie vérité, about the fashion in which you and the Professor and the Puritans and the Mid-West and the Anti-Saloon League—in short the Anglo-Saxon minority—downed the great hearty Teutonic, Celtic, Italic, Slavic, Hebraic majority, the glad, gay, sinful, eating-and-drinking majority, and put it over on us."

"My dear man," said His Excellency in his quietly impressive diplomatic manner, "don't tell me that you accept that fable. You call yourself a realist! Neither the Anti-Saloon League

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 nor the Puritans nor the Professor nor I had any more to do with passing the Eighteenth Amendment than a butterfly on a steam-roller has to do with building the Lincoln highway, or than a catfish in the Mississippi has to do with irrigating the rice-fields of Louisiana."

His Excellency held the point by pausing to light a cigarette.

"Well, we are waiting," someone prompted, after duly respecting his technique.

"Mes enfants," he continued, and then blew a ring of white smoke spinning towards the tip of one of the candles, where it hung for a moment like a nimbus and then dissolved upward. "My children, let me disclose to you the fundamental axiom of political philosophy—not the orthodox but the esoteric philosophy. Distrust the press and ignore the palaver of the man in the street. The press tells you what it thinks will be popular. The last man in the street tells you what he has heard said by the next to the last man in the street. I tell you this: You may scold yourself red in the face; you may bleed yourself white; you may shout yourself blue with pietistic, reformatory, and patriotic fervor; nothing of any importance, of any public consequence, is ever accomplished

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 in this world except by Necessity—by a succession of linked necessities."

"The theory isn't entirely novel, Excellency," I said. "And now the application."

"The necessity which put through the Volstead Act was the war; the necessity behind that was the sky-vaulting of wages; the necessity behind that was maximum production; the necessity behind that was a workman sober seven days in the week; the necessity behind that I could make concrete to you by naming the hundred leading corporations of the country that were in the belly of the wooden horse, making his feet track, when the Anti-Saloon League rode on his back into Jerusalem—or, if the figure offends you, into Washington."

"The figure seems a little mixed at the best," said Willys, "but call it Jerusalem—whither the tribesmen go up to liquidate the burden of laying taxes on us. As for your chain of necessities, now that the war is over, that chain is falling apart. The workingman sees the Big Brother in the wooden horse, who bullied him into working six days in the week and into doing, according to Union standards, two days' work in one. He doesn't like that. Besides, he knows that his

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 Big Brother's own throat isn't dry, hasn't been dry. The injustice rasps him. He wants his beer again. He wants the 'poor man's club' again. And he has a jolly good right to have them. What do you say to that?"

"Oh, he has rights enough," Oliver assented; "but the poor man's club has passed into the hands of a receiver—a mighty capable one. The poor man's club is now in the hands of his wife. She is in charge now of the Saturday afternoons and evenings. Do you think, when her vote is as good as his, she will let him pour his wages into the sink? Rather not. She has spent them, spent them in advance, for a generation to come."

"Yes," said Cornelia. "Isn't it a pity! Workwomen are the most wasteful creatures. Why, when Margaret—"

"You don't quite get the idea, my dear," Oliver resumed. "As I was saying—in war time, while her old man was sober, with money bulging his pockets and nowhere to go, she made him buy her a house and a Ford and a Victrola and savings stamps and baby bonds. Now she's buying a municipal playground along the line of the old grog-shops and a new schoolhouse and a hospital

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 and a couple of movie theatres and a municipal stadium and a municipal swimming-pool and God Himself alone knows how many hundred thousand miles of the finest and most expensive roads in the world."

"Why, Oliver dear," cried Cornelia, "what do you mean?" I don't know anything more painful than to report the occasional fatuity of a woman whom one almost unreservedly admires. But dear Cornelia has not meditated very deeply on the problems of the working classes. And returning to her point, she insisted: "I'm sure Margaret hasn't bought any swimming pools or hospitals."

"No, my dear," said Oliver calmly, "I doubt if she has. But as I was saying, she has her own ideas of a club—that woman. She is a Progressive. As a big employer in Pittsburgh said to me yesterday, 'She has tasted blood.' She has dug in, and is going to extend her works. Wages won't go down; they'll be higher to-morrow morning. Why? Do you suppose that new outfit of hers is paid for? Rather not. Do you suppose that the business men are going to continue in business and collect their bills? Do you suppose they know what kind of plain people pay their bills and

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 have money to spend? I fancy they do. Well! The Big Brother is still in the wooden horse. Maximum production and high wages till the Judgment Day. And Prohibition! The only ticket on which any party will hold office. That's my forecast—as a servant of the government and a friend of the workingman."

"Heaven help the poor workingman," cried Willys, "and spare us a few noble specimens of the idle rich. But now, Excellency, you must cheer our fainting spirits by explaining your point of view as the master of your private life."

"As the master of my private life," said Oliver promptly, "I deny that I am any such Janus as the Professor here tries to make me out. As a private citizen, I still believe that prohibition cannot be repealed. Within this belief I merely include, as a private citizen, my philosophic certainty that it will never be enforced, except where it is economically necessary. In my case it is not necessary; therefore, it will not be enforced. Its enforcement helps the business of the plain people; it would hinder mine. It adds, on the whole, very greatly to the comfort of their lives. It would detract from mine. The whole case against liquor grew out of the plain people's

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 abuse of it. The whole case of liquor will be improved by my right use of it. There is no 'rasping injustice,' but a beautiful poetic justice in their losing theirs and in my keeping mine. That doesn't express adequately my generosity in lending my hand to riveting the workingman's benefits firmly upon him. Many of the most decorative and not the least substantial pillars of prohibition are men of excellent and experienced palate. The most sincere and the most competent advocates of the cause are the nonconforming prohibitionists. I simply cannot understand the Senator who refers to the Volstead Act as an idiotic measure and a failure. It was absolutely necessary: nothing which is necessary is idiotic. And every economist will tell you that it has been a marvelous economic success. It wonderfully accomplishes what had to be done, and it leaves undone what it ought not to do. And there you are."

"And there you are!" retorted Willys, "you and your economic argument. But where are the rest of us? I'm sorry to say that, for economic reasons, I can't follow you. My bootlegger is devouring my royalties. Therefore, as you would say, I have strong conscientious objections to illicit liquor."

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 "I had rather overlooked that possibility," said Oliver. "But lean on me—at least till you have finished Senator Jones."

"Thank you," said Willys, "I'll do so. But seriously speaking—"

"Forgive me!" Cornelia interposed, with a delightful wave of her hand flagging the onrush of the novelist's volubility. "Before Mr. Willys begins to speak seriously, suppose we adjourn to the library. You remember that Oliver is likely to lose his temper if I keep him too long at the table fiddling with cigarettes."

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never had leisure to examine the books in the library which range from floor to ceiling. Sargent's portrait of Cornelia at twenty-five hangs above the fireplace. When we had relaxed in Oliver's wonderful library chairs before a real log fire, and had been equipped with an ambassadorial type of cigar, which the elder Carib lighted for us, and had been fortified by the highest potency of a private stock of real Java coffee, we men, at least, were in a position to contemplate the approaching midnight with equanimity. As soon as this change of base had been fully effected, Cornelia, who seldom loses the connection of things, irradiated the novelist with her most hospitable smile. (I sometimes think my feeling for her is pure intellectual respect for her skill in keeping a good topic alive and not letting conversation die out in small talk.) She smiled and said:—

"Mr. Willys, you were just about to speak seriously, when I interrupted. Please speak seriously, Mr. Willys. We are all most anxious to have you."

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 "Oh, my point of view, you mean?" said Willys. I admired his ability to find it again so quickly. "Speaking seriously, I can't—for more or less obvious reasons—take as calmly as His Excellency does the poor man's loss of pleasures. I appeal from the tyranny of our recent moral legislation to my constitutional guaranties of liberty and the right to pursue my happiness where I can find it. I agree with the Senator that the whole business is idiotic. It is idiotic impertinence to dictate what I shall eat and drink at my own table, or what I shall brew in my own cellar."

"If you had a cellar?" suggested Cornelia, rather spitefully reminding us of Willys's arrangements to leave his house in New Jersey to his wife, and his wife to his house. But, as I have said, she is firm on such points.

"Spare the wormwood, Cornelia darling," Oliver blandly interceded. "But, Willys, if you have a better remedy for our present discontents than mine, don't conceal it from the country. Everyone is clamoring for it. Only be sure it is a remedy. Be sure it rests firmly on the necessities of the situation. There is no use in talking of anything else."

"I'll tell you my remedy," said Willys, "when

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 I get done telling you my troubles. I object to governmental regulation of my diet. But I object even more to governmental corruption of my conscience. God knows I need what little I've got left, and I'd like to keep it pure. I protest against the creation of crime by Act of Congress. My conscience tells me that moderate drinking is not a crime, but one of the few certain solaces in this chaotic world."

"I had always fancied," said Cornelia, "that those who find drink a 'certain solace' are seldom very moderate."

But the cork, so to speak, was out of Willys's bottle. He flowed on unchecked.

"I protest against the legislative destruction of old customs which every civilized nation under heaven but ours respects. Your Excellency has seen the vintage in Greece, Italy, France, Germany—Persia, too, haven't you, not to speak of our Gulf Islands? Consider merely the picturesqueness of it! The romance of it! Blood of the grape! Bottled sunshine! We had a bit of it ourselves, here and there—in the green vineyards of northern California, wild grapes on the Sangamon, moonshine in the Kentucky mountains, mint-julep on the old Southern plantations. Even the

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 cocktail, you know, our own national contribution, had begun to be humanized and to have its tender local associations, as every club of distinction modified its ingredients and christened it with some lovely name: The Chrysanthemum, The Chrysostom, The Golden Girl, and so forth. Doesn't it really stir your imagination a little?"

"Yes, yes," said Oliver, first smacking his lips and then pursing them with mock severity. "Yes, we grant you all that. But what is the necessity of it? We are talking of necessities, not of sentiments. We, we Midlanders—the Professor and myself—want to know what necessity requires the tolerance of a mere beverage which is so liable to become a beastly nuisance."

"Exactly so," I said.

"I'll tell you the necessity," replied Willys. "And I'll tell you, too, that it goes far deeper than your economic theory. I return to the Saturday nights of the workingman. You know, I know, everyone with two grains of sense knows, that there is something desirous in the inside of a man which even hard roads and baby bonds don't satisfy. That something is a primitive and profound need of our elemental nature for excitement and every now and then for something like intoxi-

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 cation. Why, my wife says,—excuse me, a lady with whom I was formerly acquainted used to say,—'No woman can get along on less than a thrill a day,' of one sort or another. It's rooted in the human organism—this hunger for occasional escape from humdrum. 'Tedium'—what was it you said the other day, Professor? Rather good, you know—'tedium is three fourths of life.' I agree with you there, Professor; only I figure the tedious fraction is larger than that, even for moderately contented and comfortable people. And for the multitude, for the masses, the fraction that is not tedium is almost negligible, when it is not positive pain. But—but, in that microscopic fraction there must be a few moments or hours of heightened consciousness, a burst of hilarity, a breath of freedom, a little dream, a little edge of ecstasy—or a man will cut his throat in order to feel that he is alive."

"It is not done among the sort of people we associate with," said Cornelia, whom the argument impressed as rather silly.

"Perhaps not," said Willys, "perhaps not. Perhaps you 'escape' in some other fashion. But I say His Excellency is wrong in making light of the poor man's club. It's his safety valve. Take the

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 child of so poor a consistency, that he was unable to stand on his legs when he had reached the age of three years. They put him into a boat woven of rushes, which were the only available materials then existing, and abandoned him to his fate on the wide ocean. Another child which they begot, named Awa no shima, was also a failure, and they were driven to ask the advice of the Celestial Gods. The Celestial Gods had recourse to divination, which is explained to be a means of obtaining knowledge or information from divine beings, without their being aware of it. It seems strange that the three gods who hold the highest rank among their race, should not have been able to give a direct answer without applying to some one else, but Hirata explains this apparent anomaly by the analogy of a prince who charges each of his servants with some branch of affairs, and in answer to a request for information on any point refers the inquirer to the servant who knows all about it. The answer to Izanagi and his consort was that they should try over again, and as they carefully avoided the error which they had committed on the previous occassionoccasion [sic], they were very successful. The first of the series of children which they now begot was Oho-yamato Akitsushima, the main island of Japan, and it was born with a caul, which is the present island of Awaji. Both of the names Yamato and Akitsu-shima originally belonged to the present province of Yamato, the former dating from a late period of the so-called Divine Age, the latter from the reign of Jimmu Tennô. They were afterwards extended to the whole

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 poor devil to whom Saturday night has been the only bright spot in a black week. Deny him beer, he drinks whiskey; deny him whiskey, he drinks vanilla extract; if he can't get vanilla extract, he takes to methyl alcohol; or he falls back on drugs, and takes to theft and burglary, and crimes of violence."

"Aren't you leaning rather heavily, Willys," I said, "on what you allege prohibition has done to the criminal classes? You can't expect repeal of prohibition in behalf of thieves and thugs."

"As for the upper classes," said Willys, "I won't offend our hostess by knowing anything that simply 'isn't done.' But just consider what every one knows: the Capuan character of the New York roof-garden; the Corinthian style of current dancing; nice young girls at petting-parties indistinguishable, actually indistinguishable in costume and paint and manner from courtesans; the high spots that can't be kept out of movies; the chief interest in the novels we're reading and writing; and then the general domestic smash-up that is following prohibition. There are worse things than a liquor license, Professor, and we've got the whole pack of them on our backs by putting in prohibition."

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 I quoted my favorite passage from King Lear: "We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains of necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on."

"Quite pat, Professor," exclaimed Willys, whose wits are quick enough. "And there is, by George, a divinity in it. I maintain it's the vengeance of Dionysus! We've tried to bind a god, and, by George, he's getting back at us. See what I mean? Have you read Euripides, Excellency?"

"Once on a time," Oliver said, "not lately. Tell us about it."

"A great work—his Bacchae. Everybody ought to read it. You see, there's a reformer in Athens, called Pentheus, a straitlaced, stiff-necked Puritan, an out-and-out prohibitionist, a—a regular Mid-Western professor. Well, the young god—Dionysus, you know—comes over into Greece from Asia with his choruses, singing and dancing and swinging the ivy-wreathed thyrsus—and all that beautiful joyous stuff, you know. But this Pentheus makes up his mind that Dionysus is a bad lot, and he locks the god up in the stable—passes

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 a sort of Volstead Act on him, you understand. But he gets out—the god gets out. Of course, he gets out; on the q.t. He escapes into the hills—classical moonshine, classical bootlegging, you see. The women get hold of the stuff and, up there in the hills, begin celebrating 'mysteries'—all on the q.t. Attorney-General Pentheus says this must be stopped—law must be enforced. He sleuths up into the hills to spy them out. But the women, his own mother among them, catch him, and literally pull him to pieces, tear him limb from limb and strew the bloody fragments all over the place. That's the vengeance of Dionysus."

"How perfectly horrid!" exclaimed Cornelia.

"You know the play, Professor," said Willys, of course.

"Oh yes," I replied, as if I had been intimate with it from infancy. As a matter of fact, Oliver's telegraphic reference to Bacchus had prompted me to chuck Gilbert Murray's little book on Euripides into my traveling bag for train reading. That accident enabled me to sustain my bluff by a bit of critical wisdom. "The play is curious," I said, "coming from Euripides. He passes for a progressive, an intellectual radical. You would have expected him to sympathize with Pentheus,

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 of course. But I notice that Gilbert Murray doesn't accept the old theory that Euripides recanted and went back to the ancestral gods."

"Well," replied Willys, "in that case, I think Gilbert Murray is wrong—who is this Gilbert Murray? I've got the play here—in my overcoat pocket—somebody or other's translation, of course. You take it with you, Professor, when you go. Read it again and tell me if you don't think I'm right."

I had to laugh; and then we both explained how we happened to be reading, or reading about, the Bacchae. Then Willys returned to his argument.

"When I read this play, you know, it hit me in the eye that this thing is as old as history. This prohibition idiocy is as old as the race. If drinking could be rooted out, it would have been rooted out long ago. All the arguments against it were cheesy in the days of Noah. It sticks because, as His Excellency and I are pointing out, it is rooted in necessity. You reformers, as you call yourselves, don't know what you are about. You've bit off what can't be chewed. You are attacking religion; and it's dangerous business. You are trying to kill a god, and it can't be done."

"But my dear Mr. Willys," cried Cornelia,

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 "it isn't our God. The Church hasn't really defined its position, and of course some of the bishops are very liberal. But don't the dissenters in this country take a very firm stand in favor of prohibition? Most Americans are dissenters, aren't they? If so, then I should think you would call prohibition itself a religious movement."

"It has long been identified with the popular evangelical churches," I said.

"Don't talk to me about the evangelical churches," cried Willys. "The 'uplift' has hit the churches till they are nothing but community-improvement societies, with no more religion in them than the municipal waterworks. There is no more real relation between religion and prohibition than there is between signing the pledge and seeing the Beatific Vision. Wine is as much a part of our traditional religion as it was of the Greek religion. The Jews still drink their Passover wine. Why shouldn't they? What do you make of that passage in the Old Testament about the winecup in the hand of God? What do you make of the wine at the marriage feast in the New Testament? Or the wine in the Holy Grail? Or the sacramental wine, drunk by all the faithful, till the spirit of mystical fellowship evaporated

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 in the grape-juice of that paradox, the individual communion cup?"

"But it's much more sanitary that way," said Cornelia firmly, "really much nicer. And since everyone knows that it's only a beautiful old form—"

"Oh, you formalists!" Willys ejaculated. "You formalists are the real atheists. Till the days of frank atheism, we wished our friends Godspeed, we pledged their healths, and we launched our ships with a libation of wine. The central act of religious worship for two thousand years was a kind of sacred intoxication in the blood of the living God. Omit the central act, and religion disappears; and all you've got left is a lot of unedifying bishops wrangling over 'the higher criticism' of fifty years ago. It's the vengeance of the Dionysiac element in Christianity overtaking them. I repeat what I said before—It's just as true of bishops as it is of workingmen: human life can't be sustained without a little edge of ecstasy. If we try it, something will burst. That's my forecast!"

"And your remedial measure—" said Oliver, "your remedy, rooted in the necessities of the situation?"

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 "Why, moderate drinking, of course," replied the novelist, lapsing into the wide arms of the chair, like one from whom all the virtue has departed. "Teach Americans to drink as the Greeks drink to-day: wine everywhere, no one drunk."

"Not a bad idea," chuckled His Excellency.

"An idea of quite startling originality," I added.

"Our 'dry battery' is crackling with suppressed thunderbolts," said Oliver. "But"—he glanced at his watch—"it lacks only ten minutes of midnight and the dawn of a better era for the world. While the inhabitants of this borough of Manhattan are meditating on their sins of the past year, and signifying repentance by various acts of atonement, it is fitting that we should not let the hour pass without some appropriate ceremony. Professor, you haven't seen my new set of Casanova—a Christmas gift from the wittiest of my French friends. Let me show it to you. Willys admires it immensely."

Willys and I followed our host to his bookshelves, while Cornelia idly turned the pages of the new American Mercury. But why go into details? Oliver's edition of the Mémoires, handsomely bound in full morocco and locked in a glass case, proved to be the mask of His Excellen-

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 cy's "diplomatic reserve." From the ingredients of two or three "volumes" he compounded something which he told us was known in Washington as the "Gentlemen's Agreement," because it agreed with gentlemen.

As the clock and the bells and the whistles sounded the knell of 1923, Oliver exclaimed, "Why, Cornelia, where's the Professor's buttermilk," and he and Willys clinked glasses, and drank "To the vengeance of Dionysus!"

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now," said His Excellency, stroking his silvered brown beard and turning upon me the raillery of his dynamic dark eyes, "it's up to you, Professor. You've been sitting here like one of Uncle Sam's 'observers' at a peace conference—a chiel a-takin' notes, an' sayin' nuthin'. Don't you know that henceforth there shall be no more neutrals? You are our only representative of the great drouthy forward-looking West. Don't you know that the business of a representative is to represent? The wife of my bosom is on the fence—a friendly noncombatant, as is proper to her sex. But Willys and I have got you backed into a corner. I've shown the economic necessity of prohibition. Willys has shown the religious necessity of drink. What is the Mid-West going to do about it? Which way are you going to break? Break, Professor! But stick, as we have done, to the necessities of the case."

"I am as much a necessitarian as you are, Excellency," I said.

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 "You'd better be," chuckled Oliver. "Cæsar's wives, I suspect, had better be necessitarians."

"But I am as religious as Willys," I added.

"That's very right," said Willys.

"And so," I continued, "I shall take a middle ground."

"I see," said Oliver, "the golden mean, or temperance. Too little temperance is chronic inebriety. Too much temperance is teetotalism. Prohibition may and must be defended as the only known means to insure moderate drinking among the better sort of people. Exactly my position!"

"No, Excellency," I said, "you don't see. Mine is not exactly your position. I take the middle position according to a precept of Pascal: I seize upon both extremes and occupy all the ground between. But my extremes are not yours. The extremes which I have in mind are your economic necessitarianism and Willys's religion—his theory of the necessity of religious excitement. I lay hold of both those positions as firmly as you and Willys; but I reconcile them, instead of making them mutually destructive. Starting from the same premises, I reach a different conclusion."

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 "Of course," said Oliver, "of course. But what is it?"

"Before I state it," I said, "may I, since I am on the defensive, take a minute to rebut your fallacies and to present, as you and Willys have done, my more intimate personal feeling and private point of view?"

"Oh, yes," murmured Willys, rather sleepily, "that will be very proper."

"It will be good for you, Willys," I said. "I shall not hurt you more than is necessary. And I shall not be half so tedious as I might be if I were not leaving town on the 2.37. Relief is in sight; my taxi will be here at one."

"At one?" said Cornelia. "The children promised to be home by one, or earlier. Oliver, couldn't you all—"

"Why certainly," Oliver said. "Send away your taxi, Professor. When the Infant comes in with the car, we'll drive you to the station, and then I'll take Willys to his hostelry. But go ahead now, Professor, with your personal narrative of the great drouth in the Mojave Desert."

"It's the first forty years without water that's hardest," I said. "After that, one gets on nicely. Do you know that, far from being keen for this

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 argument, the entire subject bored me terribly, till you and Willys drenched it again in—in reality. Since my student days a generation ago, I have hardly even seen liquor enough of all sorts to float an old-fashioned alumni reunion for a single evening. A resident during the latter half of my life in a bone-dry district, I, like most of my neighbors, view the annual extension of the dry lands with the aloofest academic interest."

"Of course!" said Oliver, smiling, "of course! But you can abridge that; we all know the quality of a professor's interest in any matter of first-rate importance."

"It was not till bootleggers were commonly reported to be as ubiquitous as German spies in wartime," I resumed, "and men began to attribute all the evils of the hour to prohibition, and seriously to argue that the Volstead Act was forcing drunkenness and criminality upon numberless respectable citizens who thitherto had led lives of unblemished virtue—it was not till then that I began to feel a certain curiosity about the facts, and especially about the mental condition of intelligent and responsible people resident in territory which is still subterraneously wet."

"Their mental condition, Professor?" Oliver

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 inquired. "Why, pray, their mental condition?"

"Because I couldn't understand, Excellency," I replied, "how intelligent men like you and Willys, who have lived abroad, could permit yourselves to attribute the sexually hectic flush of recent literature and life in America to the Volstead Act. All these evils, says Willys, followed prohibition, and he wags his head and mutters, 'Vengeance of Dionysus.' Suppose, now, I seize the same absurd post-hoc-propter-hoc principles and attribute the virginal chastity of French, Italian, and English fiction and private life to the free use of intoxicating beverages?"

"I smell irony, Professor, somewhere," said Oliver, "but I grant you that Willys's logic slipped a cog there. We'll have to grant you that America dry is no more sex-obsessed than Europe wet."

"And then," I went on, "I was a little troubled by Willys's plea that, with the general decline of drinking in America, something of real poetic beauty is passing out of our lives. I honestly can't feel that he speaks realistically about that. I know the Anacreontic tradition, the literary romance of nut-brown ale and blood-red wine, perhaps as well as Willys does, and in the bookish imagination of

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 youth used myself to revel with those that 'gloried and drank deep.' Used to spout, you know, about 'Bairam, that great hunter,' and the 'sons of Ben' at the Mermaid, and so on. But when I had an opportunity to compare the Bacchic frenzy of an ancient Greek or Persian or Elizabethan, as represented by the poets, with the Bacchic frenzy of an American citizen howling drunk—I declare, it was one of the major disillusions of my life. The actual beauty of the real thing has come at last to impress me as very nebulous, like the amours of Thomas the Rhymer with the queen of the fairies. The lover is too often left 'alone and palely loitering,' with a crumpled shirt-front, with his hat in the gutter, by a green lamp-post—'where no birds sing.

"Oh, green grapes!" stuttered Willys. "What can you make of green grapes! What can you know about it, Professor? On your own showing it's twenty years since—"

"True, Willys," I replied, "true. But the pathos of distance ought to lend a glamour to one's memories. One has, you know, one's memories. Even a Mid-Western professor has his memories; and in the deep interval of twenty years all that is ugly in them should have faded out, should have

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 been gathered into the blue mist of oblivion, leaving the soft contours of the Bacchic landscape bathed in pure beauty. I don't find it so. I see—"

I hesitated. In a company like this, it is a bit awkward to talk on the killjoy side of a question. But Oliver rallied me forward.

"Tell us what you see. Professor," he said. "Life or death, give us only reality. Show us the sad pictures in the prohibitionist gallery of disillusion. We'll try to look interested."

"Well," I said, "Willys's praise of this beautiful old custom of getting drunk now and then did press a button in my gallery of memories and light up a few old pictures. They are relevant only because I did have, in my earlier years, about the average American's chance to feel the æsthetic value of this vanishing phase of our popular culture. I see pictures. As Whitman says, 'The shapes arise.

"Whitman was a priest of Dionysus," said Willys.

"So was Emerson," I said, "and so, according to my lights, am I. The shapes arise. I see a strayed reveler, with no vine leaves in his hair,—only a shirt, trousers, and suspenders,—lying on his back, and shouting children towing him by a rope

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 attached to his foot, through the main streets of an Arizona town; the reveler grins and plucks feebly at the rope and says, 'Now, boys!' This picture is thirty years old. I see a driveling swaying figure in a crowd at a street corner in Los Angeles, trying to give away the contents of his pocketbook. I see a Vermont farmer in his haymow, surly and maudlin with the unfreezable alcoholic element of frozen apple-cider; he jabs his cow with the tines of his hayfork. Returning from a mountain camp at midnight to a Massachusetts village, I see in the road before me a dim mass reeling through the moonlight and entering a cottage in the outskirts, and two minutes later I hear a woman's voice shrieking, 'Murder! murder! murder!

"Yes," yawned His Excellency, "I have always insisted that the peasantry and the proletariat were nasty in their liquor—serves them right to lose it."

"Don't interrupt my vision," I said. "The shapes arise. I see in a New England city a trolley car full of sick college students scrambling for the rear platform—one of them lies at full length in the passage; he is a little trampled. I see a fellow student regularly soaking his shredded-wheat biscuit in whiskey; he carries his flask to morning

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 chapel. I see another, stepping—without vine leaves—into the open shaft of an elevator; no god bears him up. I see other youths of the better sort in large numbers in a smoke-heavy place of midnight refreshment, after a football victory, treating to hot whiskey weary-looking painted girls in black—Stephen Phillips's 'disillusioned women sipping fire.' I see five professional men on a moral holiday, seriously approaching the task of consuming three quarts of Scotch and Bourbon before morning. I see groggy alumni embracing one another in tears, hugely pleased to be drunk with men to whom they never speak when they are sober. I see derelict artists and novelists and lawyers, quietly slipping away from professional life to settle down in a rustic hermitage to drink themselves to death. I see a group of permanent class-secretaries in secret session, running through the long list of alumni in every college who never report and never turn up; the secretaries know why, but they publish no report."

"Good heavens, Professor," groaned Willys, "His Excellency and I were not born yesterday, and doubtless even our hostess knows there are some casualties. Whiskey isn't buttermilk. Knives have edges, and are dangerous. Every-

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 thing that's good for anything is dangerous. But really now, what is the point of all this?"

"It has a point," I replied; "it has a point at both ends. It bristles with points; and all of them are dangerous to you and your remedy for our discontents—your moderate drinking. The first point is this: that customary drinking in America, whatever it may be in Greece, has been and is, on the whole, not beautiful but ugly, disgusting, and destructive. The second point is this: that customary drinking in America is so inveterately intemperate that your proposal to institute a custom of temperate drinking is really far more visionary and impractical than prohibition. Your remedy is not conceived with an eye to the essential facts in the case."

"And these are—" prompted His Excellency.

"These are," I said, "that Americans of both upper and lower classes are temperamentally hard to stop when they are started. Ninety out of every hundred Americans feel a curious pride in 'seeing the whole show'; in 'going the whole hog'; in 'sticking the thing out'; in 'going the limit'; in 'getting results'; and in 'getting there first.' This temperament shows in their drinking as in everything else. They care nothing for taste or

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 'bouquet.' They value their liquor in proportion to the quickness of the 'kick.' 'I can let the stuff alone,' they say, 'but when it speaks to me, I want it to speak with some authority.

"The first really sensible thing you've said this evening," said the novelist.

I was tempted to mention his perfectly callous consumption of Oliver's choice Spanish wine as a case in point; but I restrained myself and said:—

"A Frenchman sits down at a table on the boulevard with a single small glass of light wine; and sips, and rolls it under his tongue; and sips, and studies a cloud in the sky; and sips, and holds the glass up to the light; and sips, and looks at the river, and quotes a couple of verses of Ronsard; and sips, and considers what he was doing in April a year ago; and lifts the glass, and puts it down, and counts his change; and so on for half an hour or an hour; while the Yankee traveler at the next table selects a bottle of the most expensive wine on the list, gulps it down like ice-water, and sighs for a good American cocktail. We were born whiskey-drinkers, high and low, men and women."

"I adore wine, but I abominate the taste of whiskey," said Cornelia.

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 His Excellency relieved me of the obvious duty of saying that her taste in that, as in all things, is exceptional.

"The Professor," he continued, "overdraws it a little; but there is much in what he says. Historically considered, we have, as a people, rather taken to extremes: George III or pure democracy; abolition or a thousand niggers; the book of Genesis or Robert Ingersoll; for better, for worse till death do us part, or Brigham Young and his twenty-eight wives; the town wide-open or the town bone-dry; milk-shake or whiskey neat. It hangs together. You'll have to admit, Willys, that moderate as you and I are, as a people we insist on going in for a kick. It's rooted in what you yourself called the primitive and profound necessities of our national temper."

"It's rooted," said Willys, "in the artificial necessities created by our national puritanism. It's rooted in the artificial necessity of being ashamed to drink at home, and having to live, like a false little Sunday-School god, in the eyes of a sanctified wife and puritanized children."

"Really, Mr. Willys!" Cornelia exclaimed.

"It's the truth," insisted the novelist. "It is rooted in the necessity thrust upon a poor

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 devil by the surrender of public opinion to the prohibition bullies—the necessity of carrying a portable kick in his hip pocket, or, in the old days, of standing up with his foot on the rail and taking it quick and getting out before his neighbor—came in for his."

"No, cynic," I said, "it is rooted in a deeper necessity than that—and a real one, which can't be essentially changed. I mean, that our national custom of whiskey-drinking was rooted, like all bad things,—according to His Excellency,—in the Mid-West, rooted through a thousand miles of the richest corn-land in the world. Do you know that if the Atlantic Ocean were pumped dry and we Mid-Westerners applied our resources to it, we could fill the basin with corn whiskey every year? That is the real reason why a kick-loving people would, in America, always be a whiskey-drinking people. And that is one of the reasons why we Mid-Westerners have maturely decided to feed our corn to hogs."

"A-ha!" cried Oliver. "Striking into your argument at last! Economic theory of morals! My argument! I 'get' you, as you Midlanders say."

"Yes, Excellency," I assented, "you get me

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 very well. As a 'friend of the plain people,' you get me very well. I accept the whole of your economic argument for the necessity of prohibition. I accept every word that you say on the expensiveness of the reconstructed workman's club, on the expensiveness of his wife's post-bellum tastes, of the long future in which we may expect high wages, of the continued necessity for maximum production. But you hardly scratched the surface of the argument. You have hardly glimpsed the expanding expensiveness which the average life in America is soon going to exhibit. We are headed straight and hard for an era of broad, inclusive, expensive popular culture. The plain people, whom we've been feeding for a hundred years on the skim-milk and fragments of old morality and religion, are developing an appetite for comfort, for health, for knowledge, for recreation, for variegated pleasure, for style, for art, and for beauty, which is the most expensive thing in the world. Prohibition—and the average man knows this, even the moderately intelligent workman knows this—prohibition has its tap root of necessity in the imperative choice of our entire society between 'booze' on the one hand, and, on the other, beauty, art, style,

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 pleasure, knowledge, health, and comfort—which he knows, and you know, are the real tangible substance of modern upper-class religion."

"Oho!" cried Willys. "Getting around to my argument at last. But it doesn't sound much like what I mean by religion."

"Religion!" cried Cornelia. "Why, it isn't religion at all!"

"What is religion, my dear Cornelia?" I asked.

"Why, religion," she replied, "is what the bishops agree are the fundamental teachings of the Church."

"It is not!" I retorted, with the intimate discourtesy and dogmatism of an old friend who is also an old puritan. "My dear Cornelia," I hastened to add, "that is theology—not religion."

"Tell Cornelia," said Oliver,—whom the high Anglican tendencies of his wife rather amuse,—"tell Cornelia, Professor, what religion is."

"Your religion," I responded, "is what you actually believe in, whatever that is. My religion is what I actually believe in, whatever it is. The religion of the average American is what he actually believes in, whatever it is. What do you actually believe in, Cornelia?"

"I believe," she replied firmly, "in the Apos-

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 tolic Church, in the communion of saints—"

"His Excellency, for example, among them?" suggested Willys, saucily enough.

"Really, Mr. Willys!" said Cornelia. I felt the air cold on my cheek. I doubt if it lowered the temperature of Willys. He merely said, "I am a realist," and lapsed again.

Cornelia repeated, "I believe in the Apostolic Church—," and this time I interrupted.

"The average American," I said, "does not—at least, he does not believe in it with any such fullness of faith as he accords to baseball."

"The tone of this conversation is becoming decidedly distasteful to me," said Cornelia. She picked up a copy of Vogue and buried herself in it, pretending to lose all her interest in our discussion.

"I'm sorry," I said, "but I too, like Willys, am a realist. I have learned much from the master realists of my time—I mean the salesmen. I have learned, when I wish to make a religious appeal to man, to appeal to him on the basis of the things in which he really believes. If a man's real belief is small and mean, you've got to begin mean and small. If he believes only in his pocketbook, I must appeal to his pocketbook. If he

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 believes in his children, I can appeal to him through his children."

"Excuse me," said Cornelia, rising, "it's nearly time for the children to come home. I will telephone down to the office to have them send away your taxi." When she returned from giving the message at Oliver's desk-telephone, she picked up her Vogue again, and seated herself outside our circle, near the tall windows looking on the street. We readjusted our positions by the fire so that our backs should not be turned to her, and I continued:—

"The real business of religion is to reconcile us to our necessities. According to the powerful drive of Oliver's economic argument, the outstanding necessity to which the average American has now got to be reconciled, is prohibition. That is a rather hard selling-proposition. I don't think it can be put over except under pressure of some sustained religious emotion, or as Willys calls it, 'excitement.' Now don't you see how important it is to know what the average American sustains a religious emotion about—what he really does believe in?"

"Yes, that's all right," said His Excellency. "What next?"

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 "Well," I said, "if the average American registers no emotion about the Apostolic Church, we can't use that in a case like this, can we? We've got to fall back on our really common bonds of union—like our common belief in modern plumbing, health, youth, the athletic life, education, publicity, automobiling."

"Popular elements, anyway," said Willys. "Automobiling as a substitute for which of the Thirty-nine Articles, Professor?" I glanced to see if Cornelia were listening; but she was plucking at a holly wreath in the window and seemed intent on the street.

"It is a vital element of our popular religion," I insisted, "and by no means so absurd a substitute as you suppose. One has got to take together, you see, this whole group of genuine popular beliefs. Next one asks every honest average man if he doesn't agree that these things are what he wants and believes in, and that the group of them expresses what our modern civilization wants and believes in. Then one turns on the average man and says: 'This, sir, is your effective Shorter Catechism; and you've got to junk whiskey as your national drink, because it is just flatly incompatible with the general distribution of

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 the objects of your religion.' That's the way his religion reconciles him to his necessity."

"I had a hunch, Professor," said Willys, who had long since grown weary of serious argument, "that automobiling and drinking went together."

"They have hitherto," I said, "but—"

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speech was cut short at that point by Cornelia at the window, calling out rather sharply:—

"Oliver, why do you suppose the children don't come?" Almost in the same breath she sprang to her feet and, pulling aside the curtain, cried:—

"Oh! Oh! Oliver, what's that?" And an instant later, "Oh! Oh! Oh! How dreadful! Thank God! Thank God! Oh, thank God, it's not the children!"

"Of course not!" soothed Oliver, with his arm about her shoulder. "Of course not. What was it? Tell us about it."

We ourselves had heard, not indistinctly,—the apartment is on the second floor,—the prolonged steady screech of an automobile horn, and, in response to Cornelia's cry, had rushed to her side, expecting, I suppose, to see the fire department clearing its right of way up the avenue.

"Oh, there's been a dreadful accident," cried Cornelia. "That poor little boy—Oh, that poor little boy! They were driving like mad—to the

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 hospital, I suppose. I saw two policemen standing on the running-board of an open car coming up the street, and another sitting on the front seat by the driver. Then, for just an instant, as it flashed into the bright light under the windows, I could see that the policeman in front was holding in his arms a little boy—seven or eight years old—with his head, face upward, hanging over the edge of the car—bright red with blood—absolutely one bright red disc of blood—and streaming. Oh, it was horrible! You have no idea how horrible! And then, as it went past, I could see that there was a woman crumpled over in the rear seat, and an old man trying to hold her up."

"It must have been a shock," Willys offered; and I added something equally helpful, as one does on such occasions.

"Well, my dear," said Oliver, as we returned to the fireplace, "accidents, you know, do happen. Are you calmer now?"

"Yes," said Cornelia, "yes, I guess so. I'm trembling still. You've simply no idea how it shook me."

She sank into a chair, then recovered herself sharply, and said with a smile: "I'm sorry. Forgive me for making such a fuss over it. I'm all

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 right now. I suppose it's horrid to be so selfish—but, oh, Oliver, aren't you glad it wasn't the children? Aren't you?"

"Certainly, my dear!" said Oliver, in such a droll matter-of-fact tone that we all laughed quite spontaneously. "And now shall we talk of something else? Or do you wish me to telephone to the Infant that their mother has been anxiously expecting them for at least five minutes?"

"No, don't telephone," Cornelia protested. "It's really only just after one. I'm sure they will be here in plenty of time for the train. And please don't change the subject. I heard what you were saying. You were talking about automobiles and automobile accidents. That is what made me so 'jumpy,' I suppose. I'll not be silly any more. What were you going to say about automobiles when I interrupted?"

"It would be hard," I said, "to avoid 'improving the occasion' a little. Heaven knows I didn't get up the accident to illustrate my argument—and there's no reason to suppose that it does illustrate my argument exactly. These people may all have been perfectly sober. But if this thing, just now, had happened in a story, like that, we should have felt that it was contrived and artificial—I

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 don't recall just where I stopped, but what I was about to say was—the gist of it was, that you can make a live argument based on our automobiling civilization, with almost anybody in the United States, because almost everybody in the United States has some sort of vital interest in a car; and so the argument, as we say, comes home to him."

"That is sound enough," said Oliver.

"Yes," I said, "the things that people have in common are the things that hold them together and enable them to act together. Cars are a much more expensive cultural and social amalgam than, say, abstract fraternity, or a belief in the Apostolic Church, or even than an old family Bible. But the fact remains that cars are at present far more widely diffused and almost infinitely more used among our fellow countrymen than any of the older and less expensive amalgams. I doubt whether there is any other subject whatever upon which our people possess so large a fund of common knowledge and experience. Consider: we have fifteen million cars. That means that perhaps one out of every six or seven men, women, children, and babies in this country actually drives a car. That's what I call practical belief in an article of the popular religion. And you see—if you think

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