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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Angel and the Author - and Others, by
+Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Angel and the Author - and Others
+
+
+Author: Jerome K. Jerome
+
+
+
+Release Date: May 16, 2007  [eBook #2368]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ANGEL AND THE AUTHOR - AND
+OTHERS***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1908 Hurst and Blackett edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ANGEL AND THE AUTHOR
+--AND OTHERS
+
+
+BY
+JEROME K. JEROME
+
+Author of
+"Paul Kelver," "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow," "The Passing
+of the Third Floor Back," and others.
+
+LONDON:
+HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED
+182, HIGH HOLBORN, W.C.
+1908
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+I had a vexing dream one night, not long ago: it was about a fortnight
+after Christmas.  I dreamt I flew out of the window in my nightshirt.  I
+went up and up.  I was glad that I was going up.  "They have been
+noticing me," I thought to myself.  "If anything, I have been a bit too
+good.  A little less virtue and I might have lived longer.  But one
+cannot have everything."  The world grew smaller and smaller.  The last I
+saw of London was the long line of electric lamps bordering the
+Embankment; later nothing remained but a faint luminosity buried beneath
+darkness.  It was at this point of my journey that I heard behind me the
+slow, throbbing sound of wings.
+
+I turned my head.  It was the Recording Angel.  He had a weary look; I
+judged him to be tired.
+
+"Yes," he acknowledged, "it is a trying period for me, your Christmas
+time."
+
+"I am sure it must be," I returned; "the wonder to me is how you get
+through it all.  You see at Christmas time," I went on, "all we men and
+women become generous, quite suddenly.  It is really a delightful
+sensation."
+
+"You are to be envied," he agreed.
+
+"It is the first Christmas number that starts me off," I told him; "those
+beautiful pictures--the sweet child looking so pretty in her furs, giving
+Bovril with her own dear little hands to the shivering street arab; the
+good old red-faced squire shovelling out plum pudding to the crowd of
+grateful villagers.  It makes me yearn to borrow a collecting box and go
+round doing good myself.
+
+"And it is not only me--I should say I," I continued; "I don't want you
+to run away with the idea that I am the only good man in the world.
+That's what I like about Christmas, it makes everybody good.  The lovely
+sentiments we go about repeating! the noble deeds we do! from a little
+before Christmas up to, say, the end of January! why noting them down
+must be a comfort to you."
+
+"Yes," he admitted, "noble deeds are always a great joy to me."
+
+"They are to all of us," I said; "I love to think of all the good deeds I
+myself have done.  I have often thought of keeping a diary--jotting them
+down each day.  It would be so nice for one's children."
+
+He agreed there was an idea in this.
+
+"That book of yours," I said, "I suppose, now, it contains all the good
+actions that we men and women have been doing during the last six weeks?"
+It was a bulky looking volume.
+
+Yes, he answered, they were all recorded in the book.
+
+
+
+The Author tells of his Good Deeds.
+
+
+It was more for the sake of talking of his than anything else that I kept
+up with him.  I did not really doubt his care and conscientiousness, but
+it is always pleasant to chat about one's self.  "My five shillings
+subscription to the _Daily Telegraph's_ Sixpenny Fund for the
+Unemployed--got that down all right?" I asked him.
+
+Yes, he replied, it was entered.
+
+"As a matter of fact, now I come to think of it," I added, "it was ten
+shillings altogether.  They spelt my name wrong the first time."
+
+Both subscriptions had been entered, he told me.
+
+"Then I have been to four charity dinners," I reminded him; "I forget
+what the particular charity was about.  I know I suffered the next
+morning.  Champagne never does agree with me.  But, then, if you don't
+order it people think you can't afford it.  Not that I don't like it.
+It's my liver, if you understand.  If I take more--"
+
+He interrupted me with the assurance that my attendance had been noted.
+
+"Last week I sent a dozen photographs of myself, signed, to a charity
+bazaar."
+
+He said he remembered my doing so.
+
+"Then let me see," I continued, "I have been to two ordinary balls.  I
+don't care much about dancing, but a few of us generally play a little
+bridge; and to one fancy dress affair.  I went as Sir Walter Raleigh.
+Some men cannot afford to show their leg.  What I say is, if a man can,
+why not?  It isn't often that one gets the opportunity of really looking
+one's best."
+
+He told me all three balls had been duly entered: and commented upon.
+
+"And, of course, you remember my performance of Talbot Champneys in _Our
+Boys_ the week before last, in aid of the Fund for Poor Curates," I went
+on.  "I don't know whether you saw the notice in the _Morning Post_,
+but--"
+
+He again interrupted me to remark that what the _Morning Post_ man said
+would be entered, one way or the other, to the critic of the _Morning
+Post_, and had nothing to do with me.  "Of course not," I agreed; "and
+between ourselves, I don't think the charity got very much.  Expenses,
+when you come to add refreshments and one thing and another, mount up.
+But I fancy they rather liked my Talbot Champneys."
+
+He replied that he had been present at the performance, and had made his
+own report.
+
+I also reminded him of the four balcony seats I had taken for the monster
+show at His Majesty's in aid of the Fund for the Destitute British in
+Johannesburg.  Not all the celebrated actors and actresses announced on
+the posters had appeared, but all had sent letters full of kindly wishes;
+and the others--all the celebrities one had never heard of--had turned up
+to a man.  Still, on the whole, the show was well worth the money.  There
+was nothing to grumble at.
+
+There were other noble deeds of mine.  I could not remember them at the
+time in their entirety.  I seemed to have done a good many.  But I did
+remember the rummage sale to which I sent all my old clothes, including a
+coat that had got mixed up with them by accident, and that I believe I
+could have worn again.
+
+And also the raffle I had joined for a motor-car.
+
+The Angel said I really need not be alarmed, that everything had been
+noted, together with other matters I, may be, had forgotten.
+
+
+
+The Angel appears to have made a slight Mistake.
+
+
+I felt a certain curiosity.  We had been getting on very well together--so
+it had seemed to me.  I asked him if he would mind my seeing the book.  He
+said there could be no objection.  He opened it at the page devoted to
+myself, and I flew a little higher, and looked down over his shoulder.  I
+can hardly believe it, even now--that I could have dreamt anything so
+foolish:
+
+He had got it all down wrong!
+
+Instead of to the credit side of my account he had put the whole bag of
+tricks to my debit.  He had mixed them up with my sins--with my acts of
+hypocrisy, vanity, self-indulgence.  Under the head of Charity he had but
+one item to my credit for the past six months: my giving up my seat
+inside a tramcar, late one wet night, to a dismal-looking old woman, who
+had not had even the politeness to say "thank you," she seemed just half
+asleep.  According to this idiot, all the time and money I had spent
+responding to these charitable appeals had been wasted.
+
+I was not angry with him, at first.  I was willing to regard what he had
+done as merely a clerical error.
+
+"You have got the items down all right," I said (I spoke quite friendly),
+"but you have made a slight mistake--we all do now and again; you have
+put them down on the wrong side of the book.  I only hope this sort of
+thing doesn't occur often."
+
+What irritated me as much as anything was the grave, passionless face the
+Angel turned upon me.
+
+"There is no mistake," he answered.
+
+"No mistake!" I cried.  "Why, you blundering--"
+
+He closed the book with a weary sigh.
+
+I felt so mad with him, I went to snatch it out of his hand.  He did not
+do anything that I was aware of, but at once I began falling.  The faint
+luminosity beneath me grew, and then the lights of London seemed shooting
+up to meet me.  I was coming down on the clock tower at Westminster.  I
+gave myself a convulsive twist, hoping to escape it, and fell into the
+river.
+
+And then I awoke.
+
+But it stays with me: the weary sadness of the Angel's face.  I cannot
+shake remembrance from me.  Would I have done better, had I taken the
+money I had spent upon these fooleries, gone down with it among the poor
+myself, asking nothing in return.  Is this fraction of our superfluity,
+flung without further thought or care into the collection box, likely to
+satisfy the Impracticable Idealist, who actually suggested--one shrugs
+one's shoulders when one thinks of it--that one should sell all one had
+and give to the poor?
+
+
+
+The Author is troubled concerning his Investments.
+
+
+Or is our charity but a salve to conscience--an insurance, at decidedly
+moderate premium, in case, after all, there should happen to be another
+world?  Is Charity lending to the Lord something we can so easily do
+without?
+
+I remember a lady tidying up her house, clearing it of rubbish.  She
+called it "Giving to the Fresh Air Fund."  Into the heap of lumber one of
+her daughters flung a pair of crutches that for years had been knocking
+about the house.  The lady picked them out again.
+
+"We won't give those away," she said, "they might come in useful again.
+One never knows."
+
+Another lady, I remember coming downstairs one evening dressed for a
+fancy ball.  I forget the title of the charity, but I remember that every
+lady who sold more than ten tickets received an autograph letter of
+thanks from the Duchess who was the president.  The tickets were twelve
+and sixpence each and included light refreshments and a very substantial
+supper.  One presumes the odd sixpence reached the poor--or at least the
+noisier portion of them.
+
+"A little _decolletee_, isn't it, my dear?" suggested a lady friend, as
+the charitable dancer entered the drawing-room.
+
+"Perhaps it is--a little," she admitted, "but we all of us ought to do
+all we can for the Cause.  Don't you think so, dear?"
+
+Really, seeing the amount we give in charity, the wonder is there are any
+poor left.  It is a comfort that there are.  What should we do without
+them?  Our fur-clad little girls! our jolly, red-faced squires! we should
+never know how good they were, but for the poor?  Without the poor how
+could we be virtuous?  We should have to go about giving to each other.
+And friends expect such expensive presents, while a shilling here and
+there among the poor brings to us all the sensations of a good Samaritan.
+Providence has been very thoughtful in providing us with poor.
+
+Dear Lady Bountiful! does it not ever occur to you to thank God for the
+poor?  The clean, grateful poor, who bob their heads and curtsey and
+assure you that heaven is going to repay you a thousandfold.  One does
+hope you will not be disappointed.
+
+An East-End curate once told me, with a twinkle in his eye, of a smart
+lady who called upon him in her carriage, and insisted on his going round
+with her to show her where the poor hid themselves.  They went down many
+streets, and the lady distributed her parcels.  Then they came to one of
+the worst, a very narrow street.  The coachman gave it one glance.
+
+"Sorry, my lady," said the coachman, "but the carriage won't go down."
+
+The lady sighed.
+
+"I am afraid we shall have to leave it," she said.
+
+So the gallant greys dashed past.
+
+Where the real poor creep I fear there is no room for Lady Bountiful's
+fine coach.  The ways are very narrow--wide enough only for little Sister
+Pity, stealing softly.
+
+I put it to my friend, the curate:
+
+"But if all this charity is, as you say, so useless; if it touches but
+the fringe; if it makes the evil worse, what would you do?"
+
+
+
+And questions a Man of Thought.
+
+
+"I would substitute Justice," he answered; "there would be no need for
+Charity."
+
+
+  "But it is so delightful to give," I answered.
+
+"Yes," he agreed.  "It is better to give than to receive.  I was thinking
+of the receiver.  And my ideal is a long way off.  We shall have to work
+towards it slowly."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Philosophy and the Daemon.
+
+
+Philosophy, it has been said, is the art of bearing other people's
+troubles.  The truest philosopher I ever heard of was a woman.  She was
+brought into the London Hospital suffering from a poisoned leg.  The
+house surgeon made a hurried examination.  He was a man of blunt speech.
+
+"It will have to come off," he told her.
+
+"What, not all of it?"
+
+"The whole of it, I am sorry to say," growled the house surgeon.
+
+"Nothing else for it?"
+
+"No other chance for you whatever," explained the house surgeon.
+
+"Ah, well, thank Gawd it's not my 'ead," observed the lady.
+
+The poor have a great advantage over us better-off folk.  Providence
+provides them with many opportunities for the practice of philosophy.  I
+was present at a "high tea" given last winter by charitable folk to a
+party of char-women.  After the tables were cleared we sought to amuse
+them.  One young lady, who was proud of herself as a palmist, set out to
+study their "lines."  At sight of the first toil-worn hand she took hold
+of her sympathetic face grew sad.
+
+"There is a great trouble coming to you," she informed the ancient dame.
+
+The placid-featured dame looked up and smiled:
+
+"What, only one, my dear?"
+
+"Yes, only one," asserted the kind fortune-teller, much pleased, "after
+that all goes smoothly."
+
+"Ah," murmured the old dame, quite cheerfully, "we was all of us a short-
+lived family."
+
+Our skins harden to the blows of Fate.  I was lunching one Wednesday with
+a friend in the country.  His son and heir, aged twelve, entered and took
+his seat at the table.
+
+"Well," said his father, "and how did we get on at school to-day?"
+
+"Oh, all right," answered the youngster, settling himself down to his
+dinner with evident appetite.
+
+"Nobody caned?" demanded his father, with--as I noticed--a sly twinkle in
+his eye.
+
+"No," replied young hopeful, after reflection; "no, I don't think so,"
+adding as an afterthought, as he tucked into beef and potatoes,
+"'cepting, o' course, me."
+
+
+
+When the Daemon will not work.
+
+
+It is a simple science, philosophy.  The idea is that it never matters
+what happens to you provided you don't mind it.  The weak point in the
+argument is that nine times out of ten you can't help minding it.
+
+"No misfortune can harm me," says Marcus Aurelius, "without the consent
+of the daemon within me."
+
+The trouble is our daemon cannot always be relied upon.  So often he does
+not seem up to his work.
+
+"You've been a naughty boy, and I'm going to whip you," said nurse to a
+four-year-old criminal.
+
+"You tant," retorted the young ruffian, gripping with both hands the
+chair that he was occupying, "I'se sittin' on it."
+
+His daemon was, no doubt, resolved that misfortune, as personified by
+nurse, should not hurt him.  The misfortune, alas! proved stronger than
+the daemon, and misfortune, he found did hurt him.
+
+The toothache cannot hurt us so long as the daemon within us (that is to
+say, our will power) holds on to the chair and says it can't.  But,
+sooner or later, the daemon lets go, and then we howl.  One sees the
+idea: in theory it is excellent.  One makes believe.  Your bank has
+suddenly stopped payment.  You say to yourself.
+
+"This does not really matter."
+
+Your butcher and your baker say it does, and insist on making a row in
+the passage.
+
+You fill yourself up with gooseberry wine.  You tell yourself it is
+seasoned champagne.  Your liver next morning says it is not.
+
+The daemon within us means well, but forgets it is not the only thing
+there.  A man I knew was an enthusiast on vegetarianism.  He argued that
+if the poor would adopt a vegetarian diet the problem of existence would
+be simpler for them, and maybe he was right.  So one day he assembled
+some twenty poor lads for the purpose of introducing to them a vegetarian
+lunch.  He begged them to believe that lentil beans were steaks, that
+cauliflowers were chops.  As a third course he placed before them a
+mixture of carrots and savoury herbs, and urged them to imagine they were
+eating saveloys.
+
+"Now, you all like saveloys," he said, addressing them, "and the palate
+is but the creature of the imagination.  Say to yourselves, 'I am eating
+saveloys,' and for all practical purposes these things will be saveloys."
+
+Some of the lads professed to have done it, but one disappointed-looking
+youth confessed to failure.
+
+"But how can you be sure it was not a saveloy?" the host persisted.
+
+"Because," explained the boy, "I haven't got the stomach-ache."
+
+It appeared that saveloys, although a dish of which he was fond,
+invariably and immediately disagreed with him.  If only we were all daemon
+and nothing else philosophy would be easier.  Unfortunately, there is
+more of us.
+
+Another argument much approved by philosophy is that nothing matters,
+because a hundred years hence, say, at the outside, we shall be dead.
+What we really want is a philosophy that will enable us to get along
+while we are still alive.  I am not worrying about my centenary; I am
+worrying about next quarter-day.  I feel that if other people would only
+go away, and leave me--income-tax collectors, critics, men who come round
+about the gas, all those sort of people--I could be a philosopher myself.
+I am willing enough to make believe that nothing matters, but they are
+not.  They say it is going to be cut off, and talk about judgment
+summonses.  I tell them it won't trouble any of us a hundred years hence.
+They answer they are not talking of a hundred years hence, but of this
+thing that was due last April twelvemonth.  They won't listen to my
+daemon.  He does not interest them.  Nor, to be candid, does it comfort
+myself very much, this philosophical reflection that a hundred years
+later on I'll be sure to be dead--that is, with ordinary luck.  What
+bucks me up much more is the hope that they will be dead.  Besides, in a
+hundred years things may have improved.  I may not want to be dead.  If I
+were sure of being dead next morning, before their threat of cutting off
+that water or that gas could by any possibility be carried out, before
+that judgment summons they are bragging about could be made returnable, I
+might--I don't say I should--be amused, thinking how I was going to dish
+them.  The wife of a very wicked man visited him one evening in prison,
+and found him enjoying a supper of toasted cheese.
+
+"How foolish of you, Edward," argued the fond lady, "to be eating toasted
+cheese for supper.  You know it always affects your liver.  All day long
+to-morrow you will be complaining."
+
+"No, I shan't," interrupted Edward; "not so foolish as you think me.  They
+are going to hang me to-morrow--early."
+
+There is a passage in Marcus Aurelius that used to puzzle me until I hit
+upon the solution.  A foot-note says the meaning is obscure.  Myself, I
+had gathered this before I read the foot-note.  What it is all about I
+defy any human being to explain.  It might mean anything; it might mean
+nothing.  The majority of students incline to the latter theory, though a
+minority maintain there is a meaning, if only it could be discovered.  My
+own conviction is that once in his life Marcus Aurelius had a real good
+time.  He came home feeling pleased with himself without knowing quite
+why.
+
+"I will write it down," he said to himself, "now, while it is fresh in my
+mind."
+
+It seemed to him the most wonderful thing that anybody had ever said.
+Maybe he shed a tear or two, thinking of all the good he was doing, and
+later on went suddenly to sleep.  In the morning he had forgotten all
+about it, and by accident it got mixed up with the rest of the book.  That
+is the only explanation that seems to me possible, and it comforts me.
+
+We are none of us philosophers all the time.
+
+Philosophy is the science of suffering the inevitable, which most of us
+contrive to accomplish without the aid of philosophy.  Marcus Aurelius
+was an Emperor of Rome, and Diogenes was a bachelor living rent free.  I
+want the philosophy of the bank clerk married on thirty shillings a week,
+of the farm labourer bringing up a family of eight on a precarious wage
+of twelve shillings.  The troubles of Marcus Aurelius were chiefly those
+of other people.
+
+"Taxes will have to go up, I am afraid," no doubt he often sighed.  "But,
+after all, what are taxes?  A thing in conformity with the nature of
+man--a little thing that Zeus approves of, one feels sure.  The daemon
+within me says taxes don't really matter."
+
+Maybe the paterfamilias of the period, who did the paying, worried about
+new sandals for the children, his wife insisting she hadn't a frock fit
+to be seen in at the amphitheatre; that, if there was one thing in the
+world she fancied, it was seeing a Christian eaten by a lion, but now she
+supposed the children would have to go without her, found that philosophy
+came to his aid less readily.
+
+"Bother these barbarians," Marcus Aurelius may have been tempted, in an
+unphilosophical moment, to exclaim; "I do wish they would not burn these
+poor people's houses over their heads, toss the babies about on spears,
+and carry off the older children into slavery.  Why don't they behave
+themselves?"
+
+But philosophy in Marcus Aurelius would eventually triumph over passing
+fretfulness.
+
+"But how foolish of me to be angry with them," he would argue with
+himself.  "One is not vexed with the fig-tree for yielding figs, with the
+cucumber for being bitter!  One must expect barbarians to behave
+barbariously."
+
+Marcus Aurelius would proceed to slaughter the barbarians, and then
+forgive them.  We can most of us forgive our brother his transgressions,
+having once got even with him.  In a tiny Swiss village, behind the angle
+of the school-house wall, I came across a maiden crying bitterly, her
+head resting on her arm.  I asked her what had happened.  Between her
+sobs she explained that a school companion, a little lad about her own
+age, having snatched her hat from her head, was at that moment playing
+football with it the other side of the wall.  I attempted to console her
+with philosophy.  I pointed out to her that boys would be boys--that to
+expect from them at that age reverence for feminine headgear was to seek
+what was not conformable with the nature of boy.  But she appeared to
+have no philosophy in her.  She said he was a horrid boy, and that she
+hated him.  It transpired it was a hat she rather fancied herself in.  He
+peeped round the corner while we were talking, the hat in his hand.  He
+held it out to her, but she took no notice of him.  I gathered the
+incident was closed, and went my way, but turned a few steps further on,
+curious to witness the end.  Step by step he approached nearer, looking a
+little ashamed of himself; but still she wept, her face hidden in her
+arm.
+
+He was not expecting it: to all seeming she stood there the
+personification of the grief that is not to be comforted, oblivious to
+all surroundings.  Incautiously he took another step.  In an instant she
+had "landed" him over the head with a long narrow wooden box containing,
+one supposes, pencils and pens.  He must have been a hard-headed
+youngster, the sound of the compact echoed through the valley.  I met her
+again on my way back.
+
+"Hat much damaged?" I inquired.
+
+"Oh, no," she answered, smiling; "besides, it was only an old hat.  I've
+got a better one for Sundays."
+
+I often feel philosophical myself; generally over a good cigar after a
+satisfactory dinner.  At such times I open my Marcus Aurelius, my pocket
+Epicurus, my translation of Plato's "Republic."  At such times I agree
+with them.  Man troubles himself too much about the unessential.  Let us
+cultivate serenity.  Nothing can happen to us that we have not been
+constituted by Nature to sustain.  That foolish farm labourer, on his
+precarious wage of twelve shillings a week: let him dwell rather on the
+mercies he enjoys.  Is he not spared all anxiety concerning safe
+investment of capital yielding four per cent.?  Is not the sunrise and
+the sunset for him also?  Many of us never see the sunrise.  So many of
+our so-termed poorer brethen are privileged rarely to miss that early
+morning festival.  Let the daemon within them rejoice.  Why should he
+fret when the children cry for bread?  Is it not in the nature of things
+that the children of the poor should cry for bread?  The gods in their
+wisdom have arranged it thus.  Let the daemon within him reflect upon the
+advantage to the community of cheap labour.  Let the farm labourer
+contemplate the universal good.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Literature and the Middle Classes.
+
+
+I am sorry to be compelled to cast a slur upon the Literary profession,
+but observation shows me that it still contains within its ranks writers
+born and bred in, and moving amidst--if, without offence, one may put it
+bluntly--a purely middle-class environment: men and women to whom Park
+Lane will never be anything than the shortest route between Notting Hill
+and the Strand; to whom Debrett's Peerage--gilt-edged and bound in red, a
+tasteful-looking volume--ever has been and ever will remain a drawing-
+room ornament and not a social necessity.  Now what is to become of these
+writers--of us, if for the moment I may be allowed to speak as
+representative of this rapidly-diminishing yet nevertheless still
+numerous section of the world of Art and Letters?  Formerly, provided we
+were masters of style, possessed imagination and insight, understood
+human nature, had sympathy with and knowledge of life, and could express
+ourselves with humour and distinction, our pathway was, comparatively
+speaking, free from obstacle.  We drew from the middle-class life around
+us, passed it through our own middle-class individuality, and presented
+it to a public composed of middle-class readers.
+
+But the middle-class public, for purposes of Art, has practically
+disappeared.  The social strata from which George Eliot and Dickens drew
+their characters no longer interests the great B. P. Hetty Sorrell,
+Little Em'ly, would be pronounced "provincial;" a Deronda or a Wilfer
+Family ignored as "suburban."
+
+I confess that personally the terms "provincial" and "suburban," as
+epithets of reproach, have always puzzled me.  I never met anyone more
+severe on what she termed the "suburban note" in literature than a thin
+lady who lived in a semi-detached villa in a by-street of Hammersmith.  Is
+Art merely a question of geography, and if so what is the exact limit?  Is
+it the four-mile cab radius from Charing Cross?  Is the cheesemonger of
+Tottenham Court Road of necessity a man of taste, and the Oxford
+professor of necessity a Philistine?  I want to understand this thing.  I
+once hazarded the direct question to a critical friend:
+
+"You say a book is suburban," I put it to him, "and there is an end to
+the matter.  But what do you mean by suburban?"
+
+"Well," he replied, "I mean it is the sort of book likely to appeal to
+the class that inhabits the suburbs."  He lived himself in Chancery Lane.
+
+
+
+May a man of intelligence live, say, in Surbiton?
+
+
+"But there is Jones, the editor of _The Evening Gentleman_," I argued;
+"he lives at Surbiton.  It is just twelve miles from Waterloo.  He comes
+up every morning by the eight-fifteen and returns again by the five-ten.
+Would you say that a book is bound to be bad because it appeals to Jones?
+Then again, take Tomlinson: he lives, as you are well aware, at Forest
+Gate which is Epping way, and entertains you on Kakemonos whenever you
+call upon him.  You know what I mean, of course.  I think 'Kakemono' is
+right.  They are long things; they look like coloured hieroglyphics
+printed on brown paper.  He gets behind them and holds them up above his
+head on the end of a stick so that you can see the whole of them at once;
+and he tells you the name of the Japanese artist who painted them in the
+year 1500 B.C., and what it is all about.  He shows them to you by the
+hour and forgets to give you dinner.  There isn't an easy chair in the
+house.  To put it vulgarly, what is wrong with Tomlinson from a high art
+point of view?
+
+"There's a man I know who lives in Birmingham: you must have heard of
+him.  He is the great collector of Eighteenth Century caricatures, the
+Rowlandson and Gilray school of things.  I don't call them artistic
+myself; they make me ill to look at them; but people who understand Art
+rave about them.  Why can't a man be artistic who has got a cottage in
+the country?"
+
+"You don't understand me," retorted my critical friend, a little
+irritably, as I thought.
+
+"I admit it," I returned.  "It is what I am trying to do."
+
+"Of course artistic people live in the suburbs," he admitted.  "But they
+are not of the suburbs."
+
+"Though they may dwell in Wimbledon or Hornsey," I suggested, "they sing
+with the Scotch bard: 'My heart is in the South-West postal district.  My
+heart is not here.'"
+
+"You can put it that way if you like," he growled.
+
+"I will, if you have no objection," I agreed.  "It makes life easier for
+those of us with limited incomes."
+
+The modern novel takes care, however, to avoid all doubt upon the
+subject.  Its personages, one and all, reside within the half-mile square
+lying between Bond Street and the Park--a neighbourhood that would appear
+to be somewhat densely populated.  True, a year or two ago there appeared
+a fairly successful novel the heroine of which resided in Onslow Gardens.
+An eminent critic observed of it that: "It fell short only by a little
+way of being a serious contribution to English literature."  Consultation
+with the keeper of the cabman's shelter at Hyde Park Corner suggested to
+me that the "little way" the critic had in mind measures exactly eleven
+hundred yards.  When the nobility and gentry of the modern novel do leave
+London they do not go into the provinces: to do that would be vulgar.
+They make straight for "Barchester Towers," or what the Duke calls "his
+little place up north"--localities, one presumes, suspended somewhere in
+mid-air.
+
+In every social circle exist great souls with yearnings towards higher
+things.  Even among the labouring classes one meets with naturally
+refined natures, gentlemanly persons to whom the loom and the plough will
+always appear low, whose natural desire is towards the dignities and
+graces of the servants' hall.  So in Grub Street we can always reckon
+upon the superior writer whose temperament will prompt him to make
+respectful study of his betters.  A reasonable supply of high-class
+novels might always have been depended upon; the trouble is that the
+public now demands that all stories must be of the upper ten thousand.
+Auld Robin Grey must be Sir Robert Grey, South African millionaire; and
+Jamie, the youngest son of the old Earl, otherwise a cultured public can
+take no interest in the ballad.  A modern nursery rhymester to succeed
+would have to write of Little Lord Jack and Lady Jill ascending one of
+the many beautiful eminences belonging to the ancestral estates of their
+parents, bearing between them, on a silver rod, an exquisitely painted
+Sevres vase filled with ottar of roses.
+
+I take up my fourpenny-halfpenny magazine.  The heroine is a youthful
+Duchess; her husband gambles with thousand-pound notes, with the result
+that they are reduced to living on the first floor of the Carlton Hotel.
+The villain is a Russian Prince.  The Baronet of a simpler age has been
+unable, poor fellow, to keep pace with the times.  What self-respecting
+heroine would abandon her husband and children for sin and a paltry five
+thousand a year?  To the heroine of the past--to the clergyman's daughter
+or the lady artist--he was dangerous.  The modern heroine misbehaves
+herself with nothing below Cabinet rank.
+
+I turn to something less pretentious, a weekly periodical that my wife
+tells me is the best authority she has come across on blouses.  I find in
+it what once upon a time would have been called a farce.  It is now a
+"drawing-room comedietta.  All rights reserved."  The _dramatis personae_
+consist of the Earl of Danbury, the Marquis of Rottenborough (with a
+past), and an American heiress--a character that nowadays takes with
+lovers of the simple the place formerly occupied by "Rose, the miller's
+daughter."
+
+I sometimes wonder, is it such teaching as that of Carlyle and Tennyson
+that is responsible for this present tendency of literature?  Carlyle
+impressed upon us that the only history worth consideration was the life
+of great men and women, and Tennyson that we "needs must love the
+highest."  So literature, striving ever upward, ignores plain Romola for
+the Lady Ponsonby de Tompkins; the provincialisms of a Charlotte Bronte
+for what a certain critic, born before his time, would have called the
+"doin's of the hupper succles."
+
+The British Drama has advanced by even greater bounds.  It takes place
+now exclusively within castle walls, and--what Messrs. Lumley & Co.'s
+circular would describe as--"desirable town mansions, suitable for
+gentlemen of means."  A living dramatist, who should know, tells us that
+drama does not occur in the back parlour.  Dramatists have, it has been
+argued, occasionally found it there, but such may have been dramatists
+with eyes capable of seeing through clothes.
+
+I once wrote a play which I read to a distinguished Manager.  He said it
+was a most interesting play: they always say that.  I waited, wondering
+to what other manager he would recommend me to take it.  To my surprise
+he told me he would like it for himself--but with alterations.
+
+"The whole thing wants lifting up," was his opinion.  "Your hero is a
+barrister: my public take no interest in plain barristers.  Make him the
+Solicitor General."
+
+"But he's got to be amusing," I argued.  "A Solicitor General is never
+amusing."
+
+My Manager pondered for a moment.  "Let him be Solicitor General for
+Ireland," he suggested.
+
+I made a note of it.
+
+"Your heroine," he continued, "is the daughter of a seaside lodging-house
+keeper.  My public do not recognize seaside lodgings.  Why not the
+daughter of an hotel proprietor?  Even that will be risky, but we might
+venture it."  An inspiration came to him.  "Or better still, let the old
+man be the Managing Director of an hotel Trust: that would account for
+her clothes."
+
+Unfortunately I put the thing aside for a few months, and when I was
+ready again the public taste had still further advanced.  The doors of
+the British Drama were closed for the time being on all but members of
+the aristocracy, and I did not see my comic old man as a Marquis, which
+was the lowest title that just then one dared to offer to a low comedian.
+
+Now how are we middle-class novelists and dramatists to continue to live?
+I am aware of the obvious retort, but to us it absolutely is necessary.
+We know only parlours: we call them drawing-rooms.  At the bottom of our
+middle-class hearts we regard them fondly: the folding-doors thrown back,
+they make rather a fine apartment.  The only drama that we know takes
+place in such rooms: the hero sitting in the gentleman's easy chair, of
+green repp: the heroine in the lady's ditto, without arms--the chair, I
+mean.  The scornful glances, the bitter words of our middle-class world
+are hurled across these three-legged loo-tables, the wedding-cake
+ornament under its glass case playing the part of white ghost.
+
+In these days, when "Imperial cement" is at a premium, who would dare
+suggest that the emotions of a parlour can by any possibility be the same
+as those exhibited in a salon furnished in the style of Louis Quatorze;
+that the tears of Bayswater can possibly be compared for saltness with
+the lachrymal fluid distilled from South Audley Street glands; that the
+laughter of Clapham can be as catching as the cultured cackle of Curzon
+Street?  But we, whose best clothes are exhibited only in parlours, what
+are we to do?  How can we lay bare the souls of Duchesses, explain the
+heart-throbs of peers of the realm?  Some of my friends who, being
+Conservative, attend Primrose "tourneys" (or is it "Courts of love"?  I
+speak as an outsider.  Something mediaeval, I know it is) do, it is true,
+occasionally converse with titled ladies.  But the period for
+conversation is always limited owing to the impatience of the man behind;
+and I doubt if the interview is ever of much practical use to them, as
+conveying knowledge of the workings of the aristocratic mind.  Those of
+us who are not Primrose Knights miss even this poor glimpse into the
+world above us.  We know nothing, simply nothing, concerning the deeper
+feelings of the upper ten.  Personally, I once received a letter from an
+Earl, but that was in connection with a dairy company of which his
+lordship was chairman, and spoke only of his lordship's views concerning
+milk and the advantages of the cash system.  Of what I really wished to
+know--his lordship's passions, yearnings and general attitude to life--the
+circular said nothing.
+
+Year by year I find myself more and more in a minority.  One by one my
+literary friends enter into this charmed aristocratic circle; after which
+one hears no more from them regarding the middle-classes.  At once they
+set to work to describe the mental sufferings of Grooms of the
+Bed-chamber, the hidden emotions of Ladies in their own right, the
+religious doubts of Marquises.  I want to know how they do it--"how the
+devil they get there."  They refuse to tell me.
+
+Meanwhile, I see nothing before me but the workhouse.  Year by year the
+public grows more impatient of literature dealing merely with the middle-
+classes.  I know nothing about any other class.  What am I to do?
+
+Commonplace people--friends of mine without conscience, counsel me in
+flippant phrase to "have a shot at it."
+
+"I expect, old fellow, you know just as much about it as these other
+Johnnies do."  (I am not defending their conversation either as regards
+style or matter: I am merely quoting.)  "And even if you don't, what does
+it matter?  The average reader knows less.  How is he to find you out?"
+
+But, as I explain to them, it is the law of literature never to write
+except about what you really know.  I want to mix with the aristocracy,
+study them, understand them; so that I may earn my living in the only way
+a literary man nowadays can earn his living, namely, by writing about the
+upper circles.
+
+I want to know how to get there.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Man and his Master.
+
+
+There is one thing that the Anglo-Saxon does better than the "French, or
+Turk, or Rooshian," to which add the German or the Belgian.  When the
+Anglo-Saxon appoints an official, he appoints a servant: when the others
+put a man in uniform, they add to their long list of masters.  If among
+your acquaintances you can discover an American, or Englishman,
+unfamiliar with the continental official, it is worth your while to
+accompany him, the first time he goes out to post a letter, say.  He
+advances towards the post-office a breezy, self-confident gentleman,
+borne up by pride of race.  While mounting the steps he talks airily of
+"just getting this letter off his mind, and then picking up Jobson and
+going on to Durand's for lunch."
+
+He talks as if he had the whole day before him.  At the top of the steps
+he attempts to push open the door.  It will not move.  He looks about
+him, and discovers that is the door of egress, not of ingress.  It does
+not seem to him worth while redescending the twenty steps and climbing
+another twenty.  So far as he is concerned he is willing to pull the
+door, instead of pushing it.  But a stern official bars his way, and
+haughtily indicates the proper entrance.  "Oh, bother," he says, and down
+he trots again, and up the other flight.
+
+"I shall not be a minute," he remarks over his shoulder.  "You can wait
+for me outside."
+
+But if you know your way about, you follow him in.  There are seats
+within, and you have a newspaper in your pocket: the time will pass more
+pleasantly.  Inside he looks round, bewildered.  The German post-office,
+generally speaking, is about the size of the Bank of England.  Some
+twenty different windows confront your troubled friend, each one bearing
+its own particular legend.  Starting with number one, he sets to work to
+spell them out.  It appears to him that the posting of letters is not a
+thing that the German post-office desires to encourage.  Would he not
+like a dog licence instead? is what one window suggests to him.  "Oh,
+never mind that letter of yours; come and talk about bicycles," pleads
+another.  At last he thinks he has found the right hole: the word
+"Registration" he distinctly recognizes.  He taps at the glass.
+
+Nobody takes any notice of him.  The foreign official is a man whose life
+is saddened by a public always wanting something.  You read it in his
+face wherever you go.  The man who sells you tickets for the theatre!  He
+is eating sandwiches when you knock at his window.  He turns to his
+companion:
+
+"Good Lord!" you can see him say, "here's another of 'em.  If there has
+been one man worrying me this morning there have been a hundred.  Always
+the same story: all of 'em want to come and see the play.  You listen
+now; bet you anything he's going to bother me for tickets.  Really, it
+gets on my nerves sometimes."
+
+At the railway station it is just the same.
+
+"Another man who wants to go to Antwerp!  Don't seem to care for rest,
+these people: flying here, flying there, what's the sense of it?"  It is
+this absurd craze on the part of the public for letter-writing that is
+spoiling the temper of the continental post-office official.  He does his
+best to discourage it.
+
+"Look at them," he says to his assistant--the thoughtful German
+Government is careful to provide every official with another official for
+company, lest by sheer force of _ennui_ he might be reduced to taking
+interest in his work--"twenty of 'em, all in a row!  Some of 'em been
+there for the last quarter of an hour."
+
+"Let 'em wait another quarter of an hour," advises the assistant;
+"perhaps they'll go away."
+
+"My dear fellow," he answers, "do you think I haven't tried that?  There's
+simply no getting rid of 'em.  And it's always the same cry: 'Stamps!
+stamps! stamps!'  'Pon my word, I think they live on stamps, some of
+'em."
+
+"Well let 'em have their stamps?" suggests the assistant, with a burst of
+inspiration; "perhaps it will get rid of 'em."
+
+
+
+Why the Man in Uniform has, generally, sad Eyes.
+
+
+"What's the use?" wearily replies the older man.  "There will only come a
+fresh crowd when those are gone."
+
+"Oh, well," argues the other, "that will be a change, anyhow.  I'm tired
+of looking at this lot."
+
+I put it to a German post-office clerk once--a man I had been boring for
+months.  I said:
+
+"You think I write these letters--these short stories, these three-act
+plays--on purpose to annoy you.  Do let me try to get the idea out of
+your head.  Personally, I hate work--hate it as much as you do.  This is
+a pleasant little town of yours: given a free choice, I could spend the
+whole day mooning round it, never putting pen to paper.  But what am I to
+do?  I have a wife and children.  You know what it is yourself: they
+clamour for food, boots--all sorts of things.  I have to prepare these
+little packets for sale and bring them to you to send off.  You see, you
+are here.  If you were not here--if there were no post-office in this
+town, maybe I'd have to train pigeons, or cork the thing up in a bottle,
+fling it into the river, and trust to luck and the Gulf Stream.  But, you
+being here, and calling yourself a post-office--well, it's a temptation
+to a fellow."
+
+I think it did good.  Anyhow, after that he used to grin when I opened
+the door, instead of greeting me as formerly with a face the picture of
+despair.  But to return to our inexperienced friend.
+
+At last the wicket is suddenly opened.  A peremptory official demands of
+him "name and address."  Not expecting the question, he is a little
+doubtful of his address, and has to correct himself once or twice.  The
+official eyes him suspiciously.
+
+"Name of mother?" continues the official.
+
+"Name of what?"
+
+"Mother!" repeats the official.  "Had a mother of some sort, I suppose."
+
+He is a man who loved his mother sincerely while she lived, but she has
+been dead these twenty years, and, for the life of him he cannot
+recollect her name.  He thinks it was Margaret Henrietta, but is not at
+all sure.  Besides, what on earth has his mother got to do with this
+registered letter that he wants to send to his partner in New York?
+
+"When did it die?" asks the official.
+
+"When did what die?  Mother?"
+
+"No, no, the child."
+
+"What child?"  The indignation of the official is almost picturesque.
+
+"All I want to do," explains your friend, "is to register a letter."
+
+"A what?"
+
+"This letter, I want--"
+
+The window is slammed in his face.  When, ten minutes later he does reach
+the right wicket--the bureau for the registration of letters, and not the
+bureau for the registration of infantile deaths--it is pointed out to him
+that the letter either is sealed or that it is not sealed.
+
+I have never been able yet to solve this problem.  If your letter is
+sealed, it then appears that it ought not to have been sealed.
+
+If, on the other hand, you have omitted to seal it, that is your fault.
+In any case, the letter cannot go as it is.  The continental official
+brings up the public on the principle of the nurse who sent the eldest
+girl to see what Tommy was doing and tell him he mustn't.  Your friend,
+having wasted half an hour and mislaid his temper for the day, decides to
+leave this thing over and talk to the hotel porter about it.  Next to the
+Burgomeister, the hotel porter is the most influential man in the
+continental town: maybe because he can swear in seven different
+languages.  But even he is not omnipotent.
+
+
+
+The Traveller's one Friend.
+
+
+Three of us, on the point of starting for a walking tour through the
+Tyrol, once sent on our luggage by post from Constance to Innsbruck.  Our
+idea was that, reaching Innsbruck in the height of the season, after a
+week's tramp on two flannel shirts and a change of socks, we should be
+glad to get into fresh clothes before showing ourselves in civilized
+society.  Our bags were waiting for us in the post-office: we could see
+them through the grating.  But some informality--I have never been able
+to understand what it was--had occurred at Constance.  The suspicion of
+the Swiss postal authorities had been aroused, and special instructions
+had been sent that the bags were to be delivered up only to their
+rightful owners.
+
+It sounds sensible enough.  Nobody wants his bag delivered up to anyone
+else.  But it had not been explained to the authorities at Innsbruck how
+they were to know the proper owners.  Three wretched-looking creatures
+crawled into the post-office and said they wanted those three bags--"those
+bags, there in the corner"--which happened to be nice, clean, respectable-
+looking bags, the sort of bags that anyone might want.  One of them
+produced a bit of paper, it is true, which he said had been given to him
+as a receipt by the post-office people at Constance.  But in the lonely
+passes of the Tyrol one man, set upon by three, might easily be robbed of
+his papers, and his body thrown over a precipice.  The chief clerk shook
+his head.  He would like us to return accompanied by someone who could
+identify us.  The hotel porter occurred to us, as a matter of course.
+Keeping to the back streets, we returned to the hotel and fished him out
+of his box.
+
+"I am Mr. J.," I said: "this is my friend Mr. B. and this is Mr. S."
+
+The porter bowed and said he was delighted.
+
+"I want you to come with us to the post-office," I explained, "and
+identify us."
+
+The hotel porter is always a practical man: his calling robs him of all
+sympathy with the hide-bound formality of his compatriots.  He put on his
+cap and accompanied us back to the office.  He did his best: no one could
+say he did not.  He told them who we were: they asked him how he knew.
+For reply he asked them how they thought he knew his mother: he just knew
+us: it was second nature with him.  He implied that the question was a
+silly one, and suggested that, as his time was valuable, they should hand
+us over the three bags and have done with their nonsense.
+
+They asked him how long he had known us.  He threw up his hands with an
+eloquent gesture: memory refused to travel back such distance.  It
+appeared there was never a time when he had not known us.  We had been
+boys together.
+
+Did he know anybody else who knew us?  The question appeared to him
+almost insulting.  Everybody in Innsbruck knew us, honoured us, respected
+us--everybody, that is, except a few post-office officials, people quite
+out of society.
+
+Would he kindly bring along, say; one undoubtedly respectable citizen who
+could vouch for our identity?  The request caused him to forget us and
+our troubles.  The argument became a personal quarrel between the porter
+and the clerk.  If he, the porter, was not a respectable citizen of
+Innsbruck, where was such an one to be found?
+
+
+
+The disadvantage of being an unknown Person.
+
+
+Both gentlemen became excited, and the discussion passed beyond my
+understanding.  But I gathered dimly from what the clerk said, that ill-
+natured remarks relative to the porter's grandfather and a missing cow
+had never yet been satisfactorily replied to: and, from observations made
+by the porter, that stories were in circulation about the clerk's aunt
+and a sergeant of artillery that should suggest to a discreet nephew of
+the lady the inadvisability of talking about other people's grandfathers.
+
+Our sympathies were naturally with the porter: he was our man, but he did
+not seem to be advancing our cause much.  We left them quarrelling, and
+persuaded the head waiter that evening to turn out the gas at our end of
+the _table d'hote_.
+
+The next morning we returned to the post-office by ourselves.  The clerk
+proved a reasonable man when treated in a friendly spirit.  He was a bit
+of a climber himself.  He admitted the possibility of our being the
+rightful owners.  His instructions were only not to _deliver up_ the
+bags, and he himself suggested a way out of the difficulty.  We might
+come each day and dress in the post-office, behind the screen.  It was an
+awkward arrangement, even although the clerk allowed us the use of the
+back door.  And occasionally, in spite of the utmost care, bits of us
+would show outside the screen.  But for a couple of days, until the
+British Consul returned from Salzburg, the post-office had to be our
+dressing room.  The continental official, I am inclined to think, errs on
+the side of prudence.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+If only we had not lost our Tails!
+
+
+A friend of mine thinks it a pity that we have lost our tails.  He argues
+it would be so helpful if, like the dog, we possessed a tail that wagged
+when we were pleased, that stuck out straight when we were feeling mad.
+
+"Now, do come and see us again soon," says our hostess; "don't wait to be
+asked.  Drop in whenever you are passing."
+
+We take her at her word.  The servant who answers our knocking says she
+"will see."  There is a scuffling of feet, a murmur of hushed voices, a
+swift opening and closing of doors.  We are shown into the drawing-room,
+the maid, breathless from her search, one supposes, having discovered
+that her mistress _is_ at home.  We stand upon the hearthrug, clinging to
+our hat and stick as to things friendly and sympathetic: the suggestion
+forcing itself upon us is that of a visit to the dentist.
+
+Our hostess enters wreathed in smiles.  Is she really pleased to see us,
+or is she saying to herself, "Drat the man!  Why must he choose the very
+morning I had intended to fix up the clean curtains?"
+
+But she has to pretend to be delighted, and ask us to stay to lunch.  It
+would save us hours of anxiety could we look beyond her smiling face to
+her tail peeping out saucily from a placket-hole.  Is it wagging, or is
+it standing out rigid at right angles from her skirt?
+
+But I fear by this time we should have taught our tails polite behaviour.
+We should have schooled them to wag enthusiastically the while we were
+growling savagely to ourselves.  Man put on insincerity to hide his mind
+when he made himself a garment of fig-leaves to hide his body.
+
+One sometimes wonders whether he has gained so very much.  A small
+acquaintance of mine is being brought up on strange principles.  Whether
+his parents are mad or not is a matter of opinion.  Their ideas are
+certainly peculiar.  They encourage him rather than otherwise to tell the
+truth on all occasions.  I am watching the experiment with interest.  If
+you ask him what he thinks of you, he tells you.  Some people don't ask
+him a second time.  They say:
+
+"What a very rude little boy you are!"
+
+"But you insisted upon it," he explains; "I told you I'd rather not say."
+
+It does not comfort them in the least.  Yet the result is, he is already
+an influence.  People who have braved the ordeal, and emerged
+successfully, go about with swelled head.
+
+
+
+And little Boys would always tell the Truth!
+
+
+Politeness would seem to have been invented for the comfort of the
+undeserving.  We let fall our rain of compliments upon the unjust and the
+just without distinction.  Every hostess has provided us with the most
+charming evening of our life.  Every guest has conferred a like blessing
+upon us by accepting our invitation.  I remember a dear good lady in a
+small south German town organizing for one winter's day a sleighing party
+to the woods.  A sleighing party differs from a picnic.  The people who
+want each other cannot go off together and lose themselves, leaving the
+bores to find only each other.  You are in close company from early morn
+till late at night.  We were to drive twenty miles, six in a sledge, dine
+together in a lonely _Wirtschaft_, dance and sing songs, and afterwards
+drive home by moonlight.  Success depends on every member of the company
+fitting into his place and assisting in the general harmony.  Our
+chieftainess was fixing the final arrangements the evening before in the
+drawing-room of the _pension_.  One place was still to spare.
+
+"Tompkins!"
+
+Two voices uttered the name simultaneously; three others immediately took
+up the refrain.  Tompkins was our man--the cheeriest, merriest companion
+imaginable.  Tompkins alone could be trusted to make the affair a
+success.  Tompkins, who had only arrived that afternoon, was pointed out
+to our chieftainess.  We could hear his good-tempered laugh from where we
+sat, grouped together at the other end of the room.  Our chieftainess
+rose, and made for him direct.
+
+Alas! she was a short-sighted lady--we had not thought of that.  She
+returned in triumph, followed by a dismal-looking man I had met the year
+before in the Black Forest, and had hoped never to meet again.  I drew
+her aside.
+
+"Whatever you do," I said, "don't ask --- " (I forget his name.  One of
+these days I'll forget him altogether, and be happier.  I will call him
+Johnson.)  "He would turn the whole thing into a funeral before we were
+half-way there.  I climbed a mountain with him once.  He makes you forget
+all your other troubles; that is the only thing he is good for."
+
+"But who is Johnson?" she demanded.  "Why, that's Johnson," I
+explained--"the thing you've brought over.  Why on earth didn't you leave
+it alone?  Where's your woman's instinct?"
+
+"Great heavens!" she cried, "I thought it was Tompkins.  I've invited
+him, and he's accepted."
+
+She was a stickler for politeness, and would not hear of his being told
+that he had been mistaken for an agreeable man, but that the error, most
+fortunately, had been discovered in time.  He started a row with the
+driver of the sledge, and devoted the journey outwards to an argument on
+the fiscal question.  He told the proprietor of the hotel what he thought
+of German cooking, and insisted on having the windows open.  One of our
+party--a German student--sang, "Deutschland, Deutschland uber
+alles,"--which led to a heated discussion on the proper place of
+sentiment in literature, and a general denunciation by Johnson of
+Teutonic characteristics in general.  We did not dance.  Johnson said
+that, of course, he spoke only for himself, but the sight of middle-aged
+ladies and gentlemen catching hold of each other round the middle and
+jigging about like children was to him rather a saddening spectacle, but
+to the young such gambolling was natural.  Let the young ones indulge
+themselves.  Only four of our party could claim to be under thirty with
+any hope of success.  They were kind enough not to impress the fact upon
+us.  Johnson enlivened the journey back by a searching analysis of
+enjoyment: Of what did it really consist?
+
+Yet, on wishing him "Good-night," our chieftainess thanked him for his
+company in precisely the same terms she would have applied to Tompkins,
+who, by unflagging good humour and tact, would have made the day worth
+remembering to us all for all time.
+
+
+
+And everyone obtained his just Deserts!
+
+
+We pay dearly for our want of sincerity.  We are denied the payment of
+praise: it has ceased to have any value.  People shake me warmly by the
+hand and tell me that they like my books.  It only bores me.  Not that I
+am superior to compliment--nobody is--but because I cannot be sure that
+they mean it.  They would say just the same had they never read a line I
+had written.  If I visit a house and find a book of mine open face
+downwards on the window-seat, it sends no thrill of pride through my
+suspicious mind.  As likely as not, I tell myself, the following is the
+conversation that has taken place between my host and hostess the day
+before my arrival:
+
+"Don't forget that man J--- is coming down to-morrow."
+
+"To-morrow!  I wish you would tell me of these things a little earlier."
+
+"I did tell you--told you last week.  Your memory gets worse every day."
+
+"You certainly never told me, or I should have remembered it.  Is he
+anybody important?"
+
+"Oh, no; writes books."
+
+"What sort of books?--I mean, is he quite respectable?"
+
+"Of course, or I should not have invited him.  These sort of people go
+everywhere nowadays.  By the by, have we got any of his books about the
+house?"
+
+"I don't think so.  I'll look and see.  If you had let me know in time I
+could have ordered one from Mudie's."
+
+"Well, I've got to go to town; I'll make sure of it, and buy one."
+
+"Seems a pity to waste money.  Won't you be going anywhere near Mudie's?"
+
+"Looks more appreciative to have bought a copy.  It will do for a
+birthday present for someone."
+
+On the other hand, the conversation may have been very different.  My
+hostess may have said:
+
+"Oh, I _am_ glad he's coming.  I have been longing to meet him for
+years."
+
+She may have bought my book on the day of publication, and be reading it
+through for the second time.  She may, by pure accident, have left it on
+her favourite seat beneath the window.  The knowledge that insincerity is
+our universal garment has reduced all compliment to meaningless formula.
+A lady one evening at a party drew me aside.  The chief guest--a famous
+writer--had just arrived.
+
+"Tell me," she said, "I have so little time for reading, what has he
+done?"
+
+I was on the point of replying when an inveterate wag, who had overheard
+her, interposed between us.
+
+"'The Cloister and the Hearth,'" he told her, "and 'Adam Bede.'"
+
+He happened to know the lady well.  She has a good heart, but was ever
+muddle-headed.  She thanked that wag with a smile, and I heard her later
+in the evening boring most evidently that literary lion with elongated
+praise of the "Cloister and the Hearth" and "Adam Bede."  They were among
+the few books she had ever read, and talking about them came easily to
+her.  She told me afterwards that she had found that literary lion a
+charming man, but--
+
+"Well," she laughed, "he has got a good opinion of himself.  He told me
+he considered both books among the finest in the English language."
+
+It is as well always to make a note of the author's name.  Some people
+never do--more particularly playgoers.  A well-known dramatic author told
+me he once took a couple of colonial friends to a play of his own.  It
+was after a little dinner at Kettner's; they suggested the theatre, and
+he thought he would give them a treat.  He did not mention to them that
+he was the author, and they never looked at the programme.  Their faces
+as the play proceeded lengthened; it did not seem to be their school of
+comedy.  At the end of the first act they sprang to their feet.
+
+"Let's chuck this rot," suggested one.
+
+"Let's go to the Empire," suggested the other.  The well-known dramatist
+followed them out.  He thinks the fault must have been with the dinner.
+
+A young friend of mine--a man of good family--contracted a _mesalliance_:
+that is, he married the daughter of a Canadian farmer, a frank, amiable
+girl, bewitchingly pretty, with more character in her little finger than
+some girls possess in their whole body.  I met him one day, some three
+months after his return to London.
+
+
+
+And only people would do Parlour Tricks who do them well!
+
+
+"Well," I asked him, "how is it shaping?"
+
+"She is the dearest girl in the world," he answered.  "She has only got
+one fault; she believes what people say."
+
+"She will get over that," I suggested.
+
+"I hope she does," he replied; "it's awkward at present."
+
+"I can see it leading her into difficulty," I agreed.
+
+"She is not accomplished," he continued.  He seemed to wish to talk about
+it to a sympathetic listener.  "She never pretended to be accomplished.  I
+did not marry her for her accomplishments.  But now she is beginning to
+think she must have been accomplished all the time, without knowing it.
+She plays the piano like a schoolgirl on a parents' visiting-day.  She
+told them she did not play--not worth listening to--at least, she began
+by telling them so.  They insisted that she did, that they had heard
+about her playing, and were thirsting to enjoy it.  She is good nature
+itself.  She would stand on her head if she thought it would give real
+joy to anyone.  She took it they really wanted to hear her, and so let
+'em have it.  They tell her that her touch is something quite out of the
+common--which is the truth, if only she could understand it--why did she
+never think of taking up music as a profession?  By this time she is
+wondering herself that she never did.  They are not satisfied with
+hearing her once.  They ask for more, and they get it.  The other evening
+I had to keep quiet on my chair while she thumped through four pieces one
+after the other, including the Beethoven Sonata.  We knew it was the
+Beethoven Sonata.  She told us before she started it was going to be the
+Beethoven Sonata, otherwise, for all any of us could have guessed, it
+might have been the 'Battle of Prague.'  We all sat round with wooden
+faces, staring at our boots.  Afterwards those of them that couldn't get
+near enough to her to make a fool of her crowded round me.  Wanted to
+know why I had never told them I had discovered a musical prodigy.  I'll
+lose my temper one day and pull somebody's nose, I feel I shall.  She's
+got a recitation; whether intended to be serious or comic I had never
+been able to make up my mind.  The way she gives it confers upon it all
+the disadvantages of both.  It is chiefly concerned with an angel and a
+child.  But a dog comes into it about the middle, and from that point
+onward it is impossible to tell who is talking--sometimes you think it is
+the angel, and then it sounds more like the dog.  The child is the
+easiest to follow: it talks all the time through its nose.  If I have
+heard that recitation once I have heard it fifty times; and now she is
+busy learning an encore.
+
+
+
+And all the World had Sense!
+
+
+"What hurts me most," he went on, "is having to watch her making herself
+ridiculous.  Yet what am I to do?  If I explain things to her she will be
+miserable and ashamed of herself; added to which her frankness--perhaps
+her greatest charm--will be murdered.  The trouble runs through
+everything.  She won't take my advice about her frocks.  She laughs, and
+repeats to me--well, the lies that other women tell a girl who is
+spoiling herself by dressing absurdly; especially when she is a pretty
+girl and they are anxious she should go on spoiling herself.  She bought
+a hat last week, one day when I was not with her.  It only wants the
+candles to look like a Christmas tree.  They insist on her taking it off
+so they may examine it more closely, with the idea of having one built
+like it for themselves; and she sits by delighted, and explains to them
+the secret of the thing.  We get to parties half an hour before the
+opening time; she is afraid of being a minute late.  They have told her
+that the party can't begin without her--isn't worth calling a party till
+she's there.  We are always the last to go.  The other people don't
+matter, but if she goes they will feel the whole thing has been a
+failure.  She is dead for want of sleep, and they are sick and tired of
+us; but if I look at my watch they talk as if their hearts were breaking,
+and she thinks me a brute for wanting to leave friends so passionately
+attached to us.
+
+"Why do we all play this silly game; what is the sense of it?" he wanted
+to know.
+
+I could not tell him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Fire and the Foreigner.
+
+
+They are odd folk, these foreigners.  There are moments of despair when I
+almost give them up--feel I don't care what becomes of them--feel as if I
+could let them muddle on in their own way--wash my hands of them, so to
+speak, and attend exclusively to my own business: we all have our days of
+feebleness.  They will sit outside a cafe on a freezing night, with an
+east wind blowing, and play dominoes.  They will stand outside a tramcar,
+rushing through the icy air at fifteen miles an hour, and refuse to go
+inside, even to oblige a lady.  Yet in railway carriages, in which you
+could grill a bloater by the simple process of laying it underneath the
+seat, they will insist on the window being closed, light cigars to keep
+their noses warm, and sit with the collars of their fur coats buttoned up
+around their necks.
+
+In their houses they keep the double windows hermetically sealed for
+three or four months at a time: and the hot air quivering about the
+stoves scorches your face if you venture nearer to it than a yard.  Travel
+can broaden the mind.  It can also suggest to the Britisher that in some
+respects his countrymen are nothing near so silly as they are supposed to
+be.  There was a time when I used to sit with my legs stretched out
+before the English coal fire and listen with respectful attention while
+people who I thought knew all about it explained to me how wicked and how
+wasteful were our methods.
+
+All the heat from that fire, they told me, was going up the chimney.  I
+did not like to answer them that notwithstanding I felt warm and cosy.  I
+feared it might be merely British stupidity that kept me warm and cosy,
+not the fire at all.  How could it be the fire?  The heat from the fire
+was going up the chimney.  It was the glow of ignorance that was making
+my toes tingle.  Besides, if by sitting close in front of the fire and
+looking hard at it, I did contrive, by hypnotic suggestion, maybe, to
+fancy myself warm, what should I feel like at the other end of the room?
+
+It seemed like begging the question to reply that I had no particular use
+for the other end of the room, that generally speaking there was room
+enough about the fire for all the people I really cared for, that sitting
+altogether round the fire seemed quite as sensible as sulking by one's
+self in a corner the other end of the room, that the fire made a cheerful
+and convenient focus for family and friends.  They pointed out to me how
+a stove, blocking up the centre of the room, with a dingy looking
+fluepipe wandering round the ceiling, would enable us to sit ranged round
+the walls, like patients in a hospital waiting-room, and use up coke and
+potato-peelings.
+
+Since then I have had practical experience of the scientific stove.  I
+want the old-fashioned, unsanitary, wasteful, illogical, open fireplace.
+I want the heat to go up the chimney, instead of stopping in the room and
+giving me a headache, and making everything go round.  When I come in out
+of the snow I want to see a fire--something that says to me with a
+cheerful crackle, "Hallo, old man, cold outside, isn't it?  Come and sit
+down.  Come quite close and warm your hands.  That's right, put your foot
+under him and persuade him to move a yard or two.  That's all he's been
+doing for the last hour, lying there roasting himself, lazy little devil.
+He'll get softening of the spine, that's what will happen to him.  Put
+your toes on the fender.  The tea will be here in a minute."
+
+
+
+My British Stupidity.
+
+
+I want something that I can toast my back against, while standing with
+coat tails tucked up and my hands in my pockets, explaining things to
+people.  I don't want a comfortless, staring, white thing, in a corner of
+the room, behind the sofa--a thing that looks and smells like a family
+tomb.  It may be hygienic, and it may be hot, but it does not seem to do
+me any good.  It has its advantages: it contains a cupboard into which
+you can put things to dry.  You can also forget them, and leave them
+there.  Then people complain of a smell of burning, and hope the house is
+not on fire, and you ease their mind by explaining to them that it is
+probably only your boots.  Complicated internal arrangements are worked
+by a key.  If you put on too much fuel, and do not work this key
+properly, the thing explodes.  And if you do not put on any coal at all
+and the fire goes out suddenly, then likewise it explodes.  That is the
+only way it knows of calling attention to itself.  On the Continent you
+know when the fire wants seeing to merely by listening:
+
+"Sounded like the dining-room, that last explosion," somebody remarks.
+
+"I think not," observes another, "I distinctly felt the shock behind
+me--my bedroom, I expect."
+
+Bits of ceiling begin to fall, and you notice that the mirror over the
+sideboard is slowly coming towards you.
+
+"Why it must be this stove," you say; "curious how difficult it is to
+locate sound."
+
+You snatch up the children and hurry out of the room.  After a while,
+when things have settled down, you venture to look in again.  Maybe it
+was only a mild explosion.  A ten-pound note and a couple of plumbers in
+the house for a week will put things right again.  They tell me they are
+economical, these German stoves, but you have got to understand them.  I
+think I have learnt the trick of them at last: and I don't suppose, all
+told, it has cost me more than fifty pounds.  And now I am trying to
+teach the rest of the family.  What I complain about the family is that
+they do not seem anxious to learn.
+
+"You do it," they say, pressing the coal scoop into my hand: "it makes us
+nervous."
+
+It is a pretty, patriarchal idea: I stand between the trusting, admiring
+family and these explosive stoves that are the terror of their lives.
+They gather round me in a group and watch me, the capable, all-knowing
+Head who fears no foreign stove.  But there are days when I get tired of
+going round making up fires.
+
+Nor is it sufficient to understand only one particular stove.  The
+practical foreigner prides himself upon having various stoves, adapted to
+various work.  Hitherto I have been speaking only of the stove supposed
+to be best suited to reception rooms and bedrooms.  The hall is provided
+with another sort of stove altogether: an iron stove this, that turns up
+its nose at coke and potato-peelings.  If you give it anything else but
+the best coal it explodes.  It is like living surrounded by peppery old
+colonels, trying to pass a peaceful winter among these passionate stoves.
+There is a stove in the kitchen to be used only for roasting: this one
+will not look at anything else but wood.  Give it a bit of coal, meaning
+to be kind, and before you are out of the room it has exploded.
+
+Then there is a trick stove specially popular in Belgium.  It has a
+little door at the top and another little door at the bottom, and looks
+like a pepper-caster.  Whether it is happy or not depends upon those two
+little doors.  There are times when it feels it wants the bottom door
+shut and the top door open, or _vice versa_, or both open at the same
+time, or both shut--it is a fussy little stove.
+
+Ordinary intelligence does not help you much with this stove.  You want
+to be bred in the country.  It is a question of instinct: you have to
+have Belgian blood in your veins to get on comfortably with it.  On the
+whole, it is a mild little stove, this Belgian pet.  It does not often
+explode: it only gets angry, and throws its cover into the air, and
+flings hot coals about the room.  It lives, generally speaking, inside an
+iron cupboard with two doors.  When you want it, you open these doors,
+and pull it out into the room.  It works on a swivel.  And when you don't
+want it you try to push it back again, and then the whole thing tumbles
+over, and the girl throws her hands up to Heaven and says, "Mon Dieu!"
+and screams for the cook and the _femme journee_, and they all three say
+"Mon Dieu!" and fall upon it with buckets of water.  By the time
+everything has been extinguished you have made up your mind to substitute
+for it just the ordinary explosive stove to which you are accustomed.
+
+
+
+I am considered Cold and Mad.
+
+
+In your own house you can, of course, open the windows, and thus defeat
+the foreign stove.  The rest of the street thinks you mad, but then the
+Englishman is considered by all foreigners to be always mad.  It is his
+privilege to be mad.  The street thinks no worse of you than it did
+before, and you can breathe in comfort.  But in the railway carriage they
+don't allow you to be mad.  In Europe, unless you are prepared to draw at
+sight upon the other passengers, throw the conductor out of the window,
+and take the train in by yourself, it is useless arguing the question of
+fresh air.  The rule abroad is that if any one man objects to the window
+being open, the window remains closed.  He does not quarrel with you: he
+rings the bell, and points out to the conductor that the temperature of
+the carriage has sunk to little more than ninety degrees, Fahrenheit.  He
+thinks a window must be open.
+
+The conductor is generally an old soldier: he understands being shot, he
+understands being thrown out of window, but not the laws of sanitation.
+If, as I have explained, you shoot him, or throw him out on the permanent
+way, that convinces him.  He leaves you to discuss the matter with the
+second conductor, who, by your action, has now, of course, become the
+first conductor.  As there are generally half a dozen of these conductors
+scattered about the train, the process of educating them becomes
+monotonous.  You generally end by submitting to the law.
+
+Unless you happen to be an American woman.  Never did my heart go out
+more gladly to America as a nation than one spring day travelling from
+Berne to Vevey.  We had been sitting for an hour in an atmosphere that
+would have rendered a Dante disinclined to notice things.  Dante, after
+ten minutes in that atmosphere, would have lost all interest in the show.
+He would not have asked questions.  He would have whispered to Virgil:
+
+"Get me out of this, old man, there's a good fellow!"
+
+
+
+Sometimes I wish I were an American Woman.
+
+
+The carriage was crowded, chiefly with Germans.  Every window was closed,
+every ventilator shut.  The hot air quivered round our feet.  Seventeen
+men and four women were smoking, two children were sucking peppermints,
+and an old married couple were eating their lunch, consisting chiefly of
+garlic.  At a junction, the door was thrown open.  The foreigner opens
+the door a little way, glides in, and closes it behind him.  This was not
+a foreigner, but an American lady, _en voyage_, accompanied by five other
+American ladies.  They marched in carrying packages.  They could not find
+six seats together, so they scattered up and down the carriage.  The
+first thing that each woman did, the moment she could get her hands free,
+was to dash for the nearest window and haul it down.
+
+"Astonishes me," said the first woman, "that somebody is not dead in this
+carriage."
+
+Their idea, I think, was that through asphyxiation we had become
+comatose, and, but for their entrance, would have died unconscious.
+
+"It is a current of air that is wanted," said another of the ladies.
+
+So they opened the door at the front of the carriage and four of them
+stood outside on the platform, chatting pleasantly and admiring the
+scenery, while two of them opened the door at the other end, and took
+photographs of the Lake of Geneva.  The carriage rose and cursed them in
+six languages.  Bells were rung: conductors came flying in.  It was all
+of no use.  Those American ladies were cheerful but firm.  They argued
+with volubility: they argued standing in the open doorway.  The
+conductors, familiar, no doubt, with the American lady and her ways,
+shrugged their shoulders and retired.  The other passengers undid their
+bags and bundles, and wrapped themselves up in shawls and Jaeger
+nightshirts.
+
+I met the ladies afterwards in Lausanne.  They told me they had been
+condemned to a fine of forty francs apiece.  They also explained to me
+that they had not the slightest intention of paying it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Too much Postcard.
+
+
+The postcard craze is dying out in Germany--the land of its birth--I am
+told.  In Germany they do things thoroughly, or not at all.  The German
+when he took to sending postcards abandoned almost every other pursuit in
+life.  The German tourist never knew where he had been until on reaching
+home again he asked some friend or relation to allow him to look over the
+postcards he had sent.  Then it was he began to enjoy his trip.
+
+"What a charming old town!" the German tourist would exclaim.  "I wish I
+could have found time while I was there to have gone outside the hotel
+and have had a look round.  Still, it is pleasant to think one has been
+there."
+
+"I suppose you did not have much time?" his friend would suggest.
+
+"We did not get there till the evening," the tourist would explain.  "We
+were busy till dark buying postcards, and then in the morning there was
+the writing and addressing to be done, and when that was over, and we had
+had our breakfast, it was time to leave again."
+
+He would take up another card showing the panorama from a mountain top.
+
+"Sublime! colossal!" he would cry enraptured.  "If I had known it was
+anything like that, I'd have stopped another day and had a look at it."
+
+It was always worth seeing, the arrival of a party of German tourists in
+a Schwartzwald village.  Leaping from the coach they would surge round
+the solitary gendarme.
+
+"Where is the postcard shop?"  "Tell us--we have only two hours--where do
+we get postcards?"
+
+The gendarme, scenting _Trinkgeld_, would head them at the double-quick:
+stout old gentlemen unaccustomed to the double-quick, stouter Frauen
+gathering up their skirts with utter disregard to all propriety, slim
+_Fraulein_ clinging to their beloved would run after him.  Nervous
+pedestrians would fly for safety into doorways, careless loiterers would
+be swept into the gutter.
+
+In the narrow doorway of the postcard shop trouble would begin.  The
+cries of suffocated women and trampled children, the curses of strong
+men, would rend the air.  The German is a peaceful, law-abiding citizen,
+but in the hunt for postcards he was a beast.  A woman would pounce on a
+tray of cards, commence selecting, suddenly the tray would be snatched
+from her.  She would burst into tears, and hit the person nearest to her
+with her umbrella.  The cunning and the strong would secure the best
+cards.  The weak and courteous be left with pictures of post offices and
+railway stations.  Torn and dishevelled, the crowd would rush back to the
+hotel, sweep crockery from the table, and--sucking stumpy pencils--write
+feverishly.  A hurried meal would follow.  Then the horses would be put
+to again, the German tourists would climb back to their places and be
+driven away, asking of the coachman what the name of the place they had
+just left might happen to be.
+
+
+
+The Postcard as a Family Curse.
+
+
+One presumes that even to the patient German the thing grew tiresome.  In
+the _Fliegende Blatter_ two young clerks were represented discussing the
+question of summer holidays.
+
+"Where are you going?" asks A of B.
+
+"Nowhere," answers B.
+
+"Can't you afford it?" asks the sympathetic A.
+
+"Only been able to save up enough for the postcards," answers B,
+gloomily; "no money left for the trip."
+
+Men and women carried bulky volumes containing the names and addresses of
+the people to whom they had promised to send cards.  Everywhere, through
+winding forest glade, by silver sea, on mountain pathway, one met with
+prematurely aged looking tourists muttering as they walked:
+
+"Did I send Aunt Gretchen a postcard from that last village that we
+stopped at, or did I address two to Cousin Lisa?"
+
+Then, again, maybe, the picture postcard led to disappointment.
+Uninteresting towns clamoured, as ill-favoured spinsters in a
+photographic studio, to be made beautiful.
+
+"I want," says the lady, "a photograph my friends will really like.  Some
+of these second-rate photographers make one look quite plain.  I don't
+want you to flatter me, if you understand, I merely want something nice."
+
+The obliging photographer does his best.  The nose is carefully toned
+down, the wart becomes a dimple, her own husband doesn't know her.  The
+postcard artist has ended by imagining everything as it might have been.
+
+"If it were not for the houses," says the postcard artist to himself,
+"this might have been a picturesque old High street of mediaeval aspect."
+
+So he draws a picture of the High street as it might have been.  The
+lover of quaint architecture travels out of his way to see it, and when
+he finds it and contrasts it with the picture postcard he gets mad.  I
+bought a postcard myself once representing the market place of a certain
+French town.  It seemed to me, looking at the postcard, that I hadn't
+really seen France--not yet.  I travelled nearly a hundred miles to see
+that market place.  I was careful to arrive on market day and to get
+there at the right time.  I reached the market square and looked at it.
+Then I asked a gendarme where it was.
+
+He said it was there--that I was in it.
+
+I said, "I don't mean this one, I want the other one, the picturesque
+one."
+
+He said it was the only market square they had.  I took the postcard from
+my pocket.
+
+"Where are all the girls?" I asked him.
+
+"What girls?" he demanded.
+
+
+
+The Artist's Dream.
+
+
+"Why, these girls;" I showed him the postcard, there ought to have been
+about a hundred of them.  There was not a plain one among the lot.  Many
+of them I should have called beautiful.  They were selling flowers and
+fruit, all kinds of fruit--cherries, strawberries, rosy-cheeked apples,
+luscious grapes--all freshly picked and sparkling with dew.  The gendarme
+said he had never seen any girls--not in this particular square.
+Referring casually to the blood of saints and martyrs, he said he would
+like to see a few girls in that town worth looking at.  In the square
+itself sat six motherly old souls round a lamp-post.  One of them had a
+moustache, and was smoking a pipe, but in other respects, I have no
+doubt, was all a woman should be.  Two of them were selling fish.  That
+is they would have sold fish, no doubt, had anyone been there to buy
+fish.  The gaily clad thousands of eager purchasers pictured in the
+postcard were represented by two workmen in blue blouses talking at a
+corner, mostly with their fingers; a small boy walking backwards, with
+the idea apparently of not missing anything behind him, and a yellow dog
+that sat on the kerb, and had given up all hope--judging from his
+expression--of anything ever happening again.  With the gendarme and
+myself, these four were the only living creatures in the square.  The
+rest of the market consisted of eggs and a few emaciated fowls hanging
+from a sort of broom handle.
+
+"And where's the cathedral?" I asked the gendarme.  It was a Gothic
+structure in the postcard of evident antiquity.  He said there had once
+been a cathedral.  It was now a brewery; he pointed it out to me.  He
+said he thought some portion of the original south wall had been
+retained.  He thought the manager of the brewery might be willing to show
+it to me.
+
+"And the fountain?" I demanded, "and all these doves!"
+
+He said there had been talk of a fountain.  He believed the design had
+already been prepared.
+
+I took the next train back.  I do not now travel much out of my way to
+see the original of the picture postcard.  Maybe others have had like
+experience and the picture postcard as a guide to the Continent has lost
+its value.
+
+The dealer has fallen back upon the eternal feminine.  The postcard
+collector is confined to girls.  Through the kindness of correspondents I
+possess myself some fifty to a hundred girls, or perhaps it would be more
+correct to say one girl in fifty to a hundred different hats.  I have her
+in big hats, I have her in small hats, I have her in no hat at all.  I
+have her smiling, and I have her looking as if she had lost her last
+sixpence.  I have her overdressed, I have her decidedly underdressed, but
+she is much the same girl.  Very young men cannot have too many of her,
+but myself I am getting tired of her.  I suppose it is the result of
+growing old.
+
+
+
+Why not the Eternal Male for a change?
+
+
+Girls of my acquaintance are also beginning to grumble at her.  I often
+think it hard on girls that the artist so neglects the eternal male.  Why
+should there not be portraits of young men in different hats; young men
+in big hats, young men in little hats, young men smiling archly, young
+men looking noble.  Girls don't want to decorate their rooms with
+pictures of other girls, they want rows of young men beaming down upon
+them.
+
+But possibly I am sinning my mercies.  A father hears what young men
+don't.  The girl in real life is feeling it keenly: the impossible
+standard set for her by the popular artist.
+
+"Real skirts don't hang like that," she grumbles, "it's not in the nature
+of skirts.  You can't have feet that size.  It isn't our fault, they are
+not made.  Look at those waists!  There would be no room to put
+anything?"
+
+"Nature, in fashioning woman, has not yet crept up to the artistic ideal.
+The young man studies the picture on the postcard; on the coloured
+almanack given away at Christmas by the local grocer; on the
+advertisement of Jones' soap, and thinks with discontent of Polly
+Perkins, who in a natural way is as pretty a girl as can be looked for in
+this imperfect world.  Thus it is that woman has had to take to shorthand
+and typewriting.  Modern woman is being ruined by the artist.
+
+
+
+How Women are ruined by Art.
+
+
+Mr. Anstey tells a story of a young barber who fell in love with his own
+wax model.  All day he dreamed of the impossible.  She--the young lady of
+wax-like complexion, with her everlasting expression of dignity combined
+with amiability.  No girl of his acquaintance could compete with her.  If
+I remember rightly he died a bachelor, still dreaming of wax-like
+perfection.  Perhaps it is as well we men are not handicapped to the same
+extent.  If every hoarding, if every picture shop window, if every
+illustrated journal teemed with illustrations of the ideal young man in
+perfect fitting trousers that never bagged at the knees!  Maybe it would
+result in our cooking our own breakfasts and making our own beds to the
+end of our lives.
+
+The novelist and playwright, as it is, have made things difficult enough
+for us.  In books and plays the young man makes love with a flow of
+language, a wealth of imagery, that must have taken him years to acquire.
+What does the novel-reading girl think, I wonder, when the real young man
+proposes to her!  He has not called her anything in particular.  Possibly
+he has got as far as suggesting she is a duck or a daisy, or hinting
+shyly that she is his bee or his honeysuckle: in his excitement he is not
+quite sure which.  In the novel she has been reading the hero has likened
+the heroine to half the vegetable kingdom.  Elementary astronomy has been
+exhausted in his attempt to describe to her the impression her appearance
+leaves on him.  Bond Street has been sacked in his endeavour to get it
+clearly home to her what different parts of her are like--her eyes, her
+teeth, her heart, her hair, her ears.  Delicacy alone prevents his
+extending the catalogue.  A Fiji Island lover might possibly go further.
+We have not yet had the Fiji Island novel.  By the time he is through
+with it she must have a somewhat confused notion of herself--a vague
+conviction that she is a sort of condensed South Kensington Museum.
+
+
+
+Difficulty of living up to the Poster.
+
+
+Poor Angelina must feel dissatisfied with the Edwin of real life.  I am
+not sure that art and fiction have not made life more difficult for us
+than even it was intended to be.  The view from the mountain top is less
+extensive than represented by the picture postcard.  The play, I fear me,
+does not always come up to the poster.  Polly Perkins is pretty enough as
+girls go; but oh for the young lady of the grocer's almanack!  Poor dear
+John is very nice and loves us--so he tells us, in his stupid, halting
+way; but how can we respond when we remember how the man loved in the
+play!  The "artist has fashioned his dream of delight," and the workaday
+world by comparison seems tame to us.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+The Lady and the Problem.
+
+
+She is a good woman, the Heroine of the Problem Play, but accidents will
+happen, and other people were to blame.
+
+Perhaps that is really the Problem: who was responsible for the heroine's
+past?  Was it her father?  She does not say so--not in so many words.
+That is not her way.  It is not for her, the silently-suffering victim of
+complicated antecedent incidents, to purchase justice for herself by
+pointing the finger of accusation against him who, whatever his faults
+may be, was once, at all events, her father.  That one fact in his favour
+she can never forget.  Indeed she would not if she could.  That one
+asset, for whatever it may be worth by the time the Day of Judgment
+arrives, he shall retain.  It shall not be taken from him.  "After all he
+was my father."  She admits it, with the accent on the "was."  That he is
+so no longer, he has only himself to blame.  His subsequent behaviour has
+apparently rendered it necessary for her to sever the relationship.
+
+"I love you," she has probably said to him, paraphrasing Othello's speech
+to Cassio; "it is my duty, and--as by this time you must be aware--it is
+my keen if occasionally somewhat involved, sense of duty that is the
+cause of almost all our troubles in this play.  You will always remain
+the object of what I cannot help feeling is misplaced affection on my
+part, mingled with contempt.  But never more be relative of mine."
+
+Certain it is that but for her father she would never have had a past.
+Failing anyone else on whom to lay the blame for whatever the lady may
+have done, we can generally fall back upon the father.  He becomes our
+sheet-anchor, so to speak.  There are plays in which at first sight it
+would almost appear there was nobody to blame--nobody, except the heroine
+herself.  It all seems to happen just because she is no better than she
+ought to be: clearly, the father's fault! for ever having had a daughter
+no better than she ought to be.  As the Heroine of a certain Problem Play
+once put it neatly and succinctly to the old man himself: "It is you
+parents that make us children what we are."  She had him there.  He had
+not a word to answer for himself, but went off centre, leaving his hat
+behind him.
+
+Sometimes, however, the father is merely a "Scientist"--which in
+Stageland is another term for helpless imbecile.  In Stageland, if a
+gentleman has not got to have much brain and you do not know what else to
+make of him, you let him be a scientist--and then, of course, he is only
+to blame in a minor degree.  If he had not been a scientist--thinking
+more of his silly old stars or beetles than of his intricate daughter, he
+might have done something.  The heroine does not say precisely what:
+perhaps have taken her up stairs now and again, while she was still young
+and susceptible of improvement, and have spanked some sense into her.
+
+
+
+The Stage Hero who, for once, had Justice done to him.
+
+
+I remember witnessing long ago, in a country barn, a highly moral play.
+It was a Problem Play, now I come to think of it.  At least, that is, it
+would have been a Problem Play but that the party with the past happened
+in this case to be merely a male thing.  Stage life presents no problems
+to the man.  The hero of the Problem Play has not got to wonder what to
+do; he has got to wonder only what the heroine will do next.  The hero--he
+was not exactly the hero; he would have been the hero had he not been
+hanged in the last act.  But for that he was rather a nice young man,
+full of sentiment and not ashamed of it.  From the scaffold he pleaded
+for leave to embrace his mother just once more before he died.  It was a
+pretty idea.  The hangman himself was touched.  The necessary leave was
+granted him.  He descended the steps and flung his arms round the sobbing
+old lady, and--bit off her nose.  After that he told her why he had
+bitten off her nose.  It appeared that when he was a boy, he had returned
+home one evening with a rabbit in his pocket.  Instead of putting him
+across her knee, and working into him the eighth commandment, she had
+said nothing; but that it seemed to be a fairly useful sort of rabbit,
+and had sent him out into the garden to pick onions.  If she had done her
+duty by him then, he would not have been now in his present most
+unsatisfactory position, and she would still have had her nose.  The
+fathers and mothers in the audience applauded, but the children, scenting
+addition to precedent, looked glum.
+
+Maybe it is something of this kind the heroine is hinting at.  Perhaps
+the Problem has nothing to do with the heroine herself, but with the
+heroine's parents: what is the best way of bringing up a daughter who
+shows the slightest sign of developing a tendency towards a Past?  Can it
+be done by kindness?  And, if not, how much?
+
+Occasionally the parents attempt to solve the Problem, so far as they are
+concerned, by dying young--shortly after the heroine's birth.  No doubt
+they argue to themselves this is their only chance of avoiding future
+blame.  But they do not get out of it so easily.
+
+"Ah, if I had only had a mother--or even a father!" cries the heroine:
+one feels how mean it was of them to slip away as they did.
+
+The fact remains, however, that they are dead.  One despises them for
+dying, but beyond that it is difficult to hold them personally
+responsible for the heroine's subsequent misdeeds.  The argument takes to
+itself new shape.  Is it Fate that is to blame?  The lady herself would
+seem to favour this suggestion.  It has always been her fate, she
+explains, to bring suffering and misery upon those she loves.  At first,
+according to her own account, she rebelled against this cruel
+Fate--possibly instigated thereto by the people unfortunate enough to be
+loved by her.  But of late she has come to accept this strange destiny of
+hers with touching resignation.  It grieves her, when she thinks of it,
+that she is unable to imbue those she loves with her own patient spirit.
+They seem to be a fretful little band.
+
+Considered as a scapegoat, Fate, as compared with the father, has this
+advantage: it is always about: it cannot slip away and die before the
+real trouble begins: it cannot even plead a scientific head; it is there
+all the time.  With care one can blame it for most everything.  The
+vexing thing about it is, that it does not mind being blamed.  One cannot
+make Fate feel small and mean.  It affords no relief to our harrowed
+feelings to cry out indignantly to Fate: "look here, what you have done.
+Look at this sweet and well-proportioned lady, compelled to travel first-
+class, accompanied by an amount of luggage that must be a perpetual
+nightmare to her maid, from one fashionable European resort to another;
+forced to exist on a well-secured income of, apparently, five thousand a
+year, most of which has to go in clothes; beloved by only the best people
+in the play; talked about by everybody incessantly to the exclusion of
+everybody else--all the neighbours interested in her and in nobody else
+much; all the women envying her; all the men tumbling over one another
+after her--looks, in spite of all her worries, not a day older than
+twenty-three; and has discovered a dressmaker never yet known to have
+been an hour behind her promise!  And all your fault, yours, Fate.  Will
+nothing move you to shame?"
+
+
+
+She has a way of mislaying her Husband.
+
+
+It brings no satisfaction with it, speaking out one's mind to Fate.  We
+want to see him before us, the thing of flesh and blood that has brought
+all this upon her.  Was it that early husband--or rather the gentleman
+she thought was her husband.  As a matter of fact, he was a husband.  Only
+he did not happen to be hers.  That naturally confused her.  "Then who is
+my husband?" she seems to have said to herself; "I had a husband: I
+remember it distinctly."
+
+"Difficult to know them apart from one another," says the lady with the
+past, "the way they dress them all alike nowadays.  I suppose it does not
+really matter.  They are much the same as one another when you get them
+home.  Doesn't do to be too fussy."
+
+She is a careless woman.  She is always mislaying that early husband.  And
+she has an unfortunate knack of finding him at the wrong moment.  Perhaps
+that is the Problem: What is a lady to do with a husband for whom she has
+no further use?  If she gives him away he is sure to come back, like the
+clever dog that is sent in a hamper to the other end of the kingdom, and
+three days afterwards is found gasping on the doorstep.  If she leaves
+him in the middle of South Africa, with most of the heavy baggage and all
+the debts, she may reckon it a certainty that on her return from her next
+honeymoon he will be the first to greet her.
+
+Her surprise at meeting him again is a little unreasonable.  She seems to
+be under the impression that because she has forgotten him, he is for all
+practical purposes dead.
+
+"Why I forgot all about him," she seems to be arguing to herself, "seven
+years ago at least.  According to the laws of Nature there ought to be
+nothing left of him but just his bones."
+
+She is indignant at finding he is still alive, and lets him know it--tells
+him he is a beast for turning up at his sister's party, and pleads to him
+for one last favour: that he will go away where neither she nor anybody
+else of any importance will ever see him or hear of him again.  That's
+all she asks of him.  If he make a point of it she will--though her
+costume is ill adapted to the exercise--go down upon her knees to ask it
+of him.
+
+He brutally retorts that he doesn't know where to "get."  The lady
+travels round a good deal and seems to be in most places.  She accepts
+week-end invitations to the houses of his nearest relatives.  She has
+married his first cousin, and is now getting up a bazaar with the help of
+his present wife.  How he is to avoid her he does not quite see.
+
+Perhaps, by the by, that is really the Problem: where is the early
+husband to disappear to?  Even if every time he saw her coming he were to
+duck under the table, somebody would be sure to notice it and make
+remarks.  Ought he to take himself out one dark night, tie a brick round
+his neck, and throw himself into a pond?
+
+
+
+What is a Lady to do with a Husband when she has finished with him?
+
+
+But men are so selfish.  The idea does not even occur to him; and the
+lady herself is too generous to do more than just hint at it.
+
+Maybe it is Society that is to blame.  There comes a luminous moment when
+it is suddenly revealed to the Heroine of the Problem Play that it is
+Society that is at the bottom of this thing.  She has felt all along
+there was something the matter.  Why has she never thought of it before?
+Here all these years has she been going about blaming her poor old
+father; her mother for dying too soon; the remarkable circumstances
+attending her girlhood; that dear old stupid husband she thought was
+hers; and all the while the really culpable party has been existing
+unsuspected under her very nose.  She clears away the furniture a bit,
+and tells Society exactly what she thinks of it--she is always good at
+that, telling people what she thinks of them.  Other people's failings do
+not escape her, not for long.  If Society would only step out for a
+moment, and look at itself with her eyes, something might be done.  If
+Society, now that the thing has been pointed out to it, has still any
+lingering desire to live, let it look at her.  This, that she is, Society
+has made her!  Let Society have a walk round her, and then go home and
+reflect.
+
+
+
+Could she--herself--have been to blame?
+
+
+It lifts a load from us, fixing the blame on Society.  There were periods
+in the play when we hardly knew what to think.  The scientific father,
+the dead mother, the early husband! it was difficult to grasp the fact
+that they alone were to blame.  One felt there was something to be said
+for even them.  Ugly thoughts would cross our mind that perhaps the
+Heroine herself was not altogether irreproachable--that possibly there
+would have been less Problem, if, thinking a little less about her
+clothes, yearning a little less to do nothing all day long and be
+perfectly happy, she had pulled herself together, told herself that the
+world was not built exclusively for her, and settled down to the
+existence of an ordinary decent woman.
+
+Looking at the thing all round, that is perhaps the best solution of the
+Problem: it is Society that is to blame.  We had better keep to that.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+Civilization and the Unemployed.
+
+
+Where Civilization fails is in not providing men and women with
+sufficient work.  In the Stone Age man was, one imagines, kept busy.  When
+he was not looking for his dinner, or eating his dinner, or sleeping off
+the effects of his dinner, he was hard at work with a club, clearing the
+neighbourhood of what one doubts not he would have described as aliens.
+The healthy Palaeolithic man would have had a contempt for Cobden
+rivalling that of Mr. Chamberlain himself.  He did not take the incursion
+of the foreigner "lying down."  One pictures him in the mind's eye:
+unscientific, perhaps, but active to a degree difficult to conceive in
+these degenerate days.  Now up a tree hurling cocoa-nuts, the next moment
+on the ground flinging roots and rocks.  Both having tolerably hard
+heads, the argument would of necessity be long and heated.  Phrases that
+have since come to be meaningless had, in those days, a real
+significance.
+
+When a Palaeolithic politician claimed to have "crushed his critic," he
+meant that he had succeeded in dropping a tree or a ton of earth upon
+him.  When it was said that one bright and intelligent member of that
+early sociology had "annihilated his opponent," that opponent's friends
+and relations took no further interest in him.  It meant that he was
+actually annihilated.  Bits of him might be found, but the most of him
+would be hopelessly scattered.  When the adherents of any particular Cave
+Dweller remarked that their man was wiping the floor with his rival, it
+did not mean that he was talking himself red in the face to a bored
+audience of sixteen friends and a reporter.  It meant that he was
+dragging that rival by the legs round the enclosure and making the place
+damp and untidy with him.
+
+
+
+Early instances of "Dumping."
+
+
+Maybe the Cave Dweller, finding nuts in his own neighbourhood growing
+scarce, would emigrate himself: for even in that age the politician was
+not always logical.  Thus _roles_ became reversed.  The defender of his
+country became the alien, dumping himself where he was not wanted.  The
+charm of those early political arguments lay in their simplicity.  A
+child could have followed every point.  There could never have been a
+moment's doubt, even among his own followers, as to what a Palaeolithic
+statesman really meant to convey.  At the close of the contest the party
+who considered it had won the moral victory would be cleared away, or
+buried neatly on the spot, according to taste: and the discussion, until
+the arrival of the next generation, was voted closed.
+
+All this must have been harassing, but it did serve to pass away the
+time.  Civilization has brought into being a section of the community
+with little else to do but to amuse itself.  For youth to play is
+natural; the young barbarian plays, the kitten plays, the colt gambols,
+the lamb skips.  But man is the only animal that gambols and jumps and
+skips after it has reached maturity.  Were we to meet an elderly bearded
+goat, springing about in the air and behaving, generally speaking, like a
+kid, we should say it had gone mad.  Yet we throng in our thousands to
+watch elderly ladies and gentlemen jumping about after a ball, twisting
+themselves into strange shapes, rushing, racing, falling over one
+another; and present them with silver-backed hair-brushes and
+gold-handled umbrellas as a reward to them for doing so.
+
+Imagine some scientific inhabitant of one of the larger fixed stars
+examining us through a magnifying-glass as we examine ants.  Our
+amusements would puzzle him.  The ball of all sorts and sizes, from the
+marble to the pushball, would lead to endless scientific argument.
+
+"What is it?  Why are these men and women always knocking it about,
+seizing it wherever and whenever they find it and worrying it?"
+
+The observer from that fixed star would argue that the Ball must be some
+malignant creature of fiendish power, the great enemy of the human race.
+Watching our cricket-fields, our tennis-courts, our golf links, he would
+conclude that a certain section of mankind had been told off to do battle
+with the "Ball" on behalf of mankind in general.
+
+"As a rule," so he would report, "it is a superior class of insect to
+which this special duty has been assigned.  They are a friskier, gaudier
+species than their fellows.
+
+
+
+Cricket, as viewed from the fixed Stars.
+
+
+"For this one purpose they appear to be kept and fed.  They do no other
+work, so far as I have been able to ascertain.  Carefully selected and
+trained, their mission is to go about the world looking for Balls.
+Whenever they find a Ball they set to work to kill it.  But the vitality
+of these Balls is extraordinary.  There is a medium-sized, reddish
+species that, on an average, takes three days to kill.  When one of these
+is discovered, specially trained champions are summoned from every corner
+of the country.  They arrive in hot haste, eager for the battle, which
+takes place in the presence of the entire neighbourhood.  The number of
+champions for some reason or another is limited to twenty-two.  Each one
+seizing in turn a large piece of wood, rushes at the Ball as it flies
+along the ground, or through the air, and strikes at it with all his
+force.  When, exhausted, he can strike no longer, he throws down his
+weapon and retires into a tent, where he is restored to strength by
+copious draughts of a drug the nature of which I have been unable to
+discover.  Meanwhile, another has picked up the fallen weapon, and the
+contest is continued without a moment's interruption.  The Ball makes
+frantic efforts to escape from its tormentors, but every time it is
+captured and flung back.  So far as can be observed, it makes no attempt
+at retaliation, its only object being to get away; though,
+occasionally--whether by design or accident--it succeeds in inflicting
+injury upon one or other of its executioners, or more often upon one of
+the spectators, striking him either on the head or about the region of
+the waist, which, judging by results, would appear, from the Ball's point
+of view, to be the better selection.  These small reddish Balls are
+quickened into life evidently by the heat of the sun; in the cold season
+they disappear, and their place is taken by a much larger Ball.  This
+Ball the champions kill by striking it with their feet and with their
+heads.  But sometimes they will attempt to suffocate it by falling on it,
+some dozen of them at a time.
+
+"Another of these seemingly harmless enemies of the human race is a small
+white Ball of great cunning and resource.  It frequents sandy districts
+by the sea coast and open spaces near the large towns.  It is pursued
+with extraordinary animosity by a florid-faced insect of fierce aspect
+and rotundity of figure.  The weapon he employs is a long stick loaded
+with metal.  With one blow he will send the creature through the air
+sometimes to a distance of nearly a quarter of a mile; yet so vigorous is
+the constitution of these Balls that it will fall to earth apparently but
+little damaged.  It is followed by the rotund man accompanied by a
+smaller insect carrying spare clubs.  Though hampered by the prominent
+whiteness of its skin, the extreme smallness of this Ball often enables
+it to defy re-discovery, and at such times the fury of the little round
+man is terrible to contemplate.  He dances round the spot where the ball
+has disappeared, making frenzied passes at the surrounding vegetation
+with his club, uttering the while the most savage and bloodcurdling
+growls.  Occasionally striking at the small creature in fury, he will
+miss it altogether, and, having struck merely the air, will sit down
+heavily upon the ground, or, striking the solid earth, will shatter his
+own club.  Then a curious thing takes place: all the other insects
+standing round place their right hand before their mouth, and, turning
+away their faces, shake their bodies to and fro, emitting a strange
+crackling sound.  Whether this is to be regarded as a mere expression of
+their grief that the blow of their comrade should have miscarried, or
+whether one may assume it to be a ceremonious appeal to their gods for
+better luck next time, I have not as yet made up my mind.  The striker,
+meanwhile, raises both arms, the hands tightly clenched, towards the
+heavens, and utters what is probably a prayer, prepared expressly for the
+occasion."
+
+
+
+The Heir of all Ages.  His Inheritance.
+
+
+In similar manner he, the Celestial Observer, proceeds to describe our
+billiard matches, our tennis tournaments, our croquet parties.  Maybe it
+never occurs to him that a large section of our race surrounded by
+Eternity, would devote its entire span of life to sheer killing of time.
+A middle-aged friend of mine, a cultured gentleman, a M.A. of Cambridge,
+assured me the other day that, notwithstanding all his experiences of
+life, the thing that still gave him the greatest satisfaction was the
+accomplishment of a successful drive to leg.  Rather a quaint commentary
+on our civilization, is it not?  "The singers have sung, and the builders
+have builded.  The artists have fashioned their dreams of delight."  The
+martyrs for thought and freedom have died their death; knowledge has
+sprung from the bones of ignorance; civilization for ten thousand years
+has battled with brutality to this result--that a specimen gentleman of
+the Twentieth Century, the heir of all the ages, finds his greatest joy
+in life the striking of a ball with a chunk of wood!
+
+Human energy, human suffering, has been wasted.  Such crown of happiness
+for a man might surely have been obtained earlier and at less cost.  Was
+it intended?  Are we on the right track?  The child's play is wiser.  The
+battered doll is a princess.  Within the sand castle dwells an ogre.  It
+is with imagination that he plays.  His games have some relation to life.
+It is the man only who is content with this everlasting knocking about of
+a ball.  The majority of mankind is doomed to labour so constant, so
+exhausting, that no opportunity is given it to cultivate its brain.
+Civilization has arranged that a small privileged minority shall alone
+enjoy that leisure necessary to the development of thought.  And what is
+the answer of this leisured class?  It is:
+
+"We will do nothing for the world that feeds us, clothes us, keeps us in
+luxury.  We will spend our whole existence knocking balls about, watching
+other people knocking balls about, arguing with one another as to the
+best means of knocking balls about."
+
+
+
+Is it "Playing the Game?"
+
+
+Is it--to use their own jargon--"playing the game?"
+
+And the queer thing is this over-worked world, that stints itself to keep
+them in idleness, approves of the answer.  "The flannelled fool," "The
+muddied oaf," is the pet of the people; their hero, their ideal.
+
+But maybe all this is mere jealousy.  Myself, I have never been clever at
+knocking balls about.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+Patience and the Waiter.
+
+
+The slowest waiter I know is the British railway refreshment-room waiter.
+
+His very breathing--regular, harmonious, penetrating, instinct as it is
+with all the better attributes of a well-preserved grandfather's
+clock--conveys suggestion of dignity and peace.  He is a huge, impressive
+person.  There emanates from him an atmosphere of Lotusland.  The
+otherwise unattractive refreshment-room becomes an oasis of repose amid
+the turmoil of a fretful world.  All things conspire to aid him: the
+ancient joints, ranged side by side like corpses in a morgue, each one
+decently hidden under its white muslin shroud, whispering of death and
+decay; the dish of dead flies, thoughtfully placed in the centre of the
+table; the framed advertisements extolling the virtues of heavy beers and
+stouts, of weird champagnes, emanating from haunted-looking chateaux,
+situate--if one may judge from the illustration--in the midst of desert
+lands; the sleep-inviting buzz of the bluebottles.
+
+The spirit of the place steals over you.  On entering, with a quarter of
+an hour to spare, your idea was a cutlet and a glass of claret.  In the
+face of the refreshment-room waiter, the notion appears frivolous, not to
+say un-English.  You order cold beef and pickles, with a pint of bitter
+in a tankard.  To win the British waiter's approval, you must always
+order beer in a tankard.  The British waiter, in his ideals, is mediaeval.
+There is a Shakespearean touch about a tankard.  A soapy potato will, of
+course, be added.  Afterwards a ton of cheese and a basin of rabbit's
+food floating in water (the British salad) will be placed before you.  You
+will work steadily through the whole, anticipating the somnolence that
+will subsequently fall upon you with a certain amount of satisfaction.  It
+will serve to dispel the last lingering regret at the reflection that you
+will miss your appointment, and suffer thereby serious inconvenience if
+not positive loss.  These things are of the world--the noisy, tiresome
+world you have left without.
+
+To the English traveller, the foreign waiter in the earlier stages of his
+career is a burden and a trial.  When he is complete--when he really can
+talk English I rejoice in him.  When I object to him is when his English
+is worse than my French or German, and when he will, for his own
+educational purposes, insist, nevertheless, that the conversation shall
+be entirely in English.  I would he came to me some other time.  I would
+so much rather make it after dinner or, say, the next morning.  I hate
+giving lessons during meal times.
+
+Besides, to a man with feeble digestion, this sort of thing can lead to
+trouble.  One waiter I met at an hotel in Dijon knew very little
+English--about as much as a poll parrot.  The moment I entered the _salle-
+a-manger_ he started to his feet.
+
+"Ah!  You English!" he cried.
+
+"Well, what about us?" I answered.  It was during the period of the Boer
+War.  I took it he was about to denounce the English nation generally.  I
+was looking for something to throw at him.
+
+"You English--you Englishman, yes," he repeated.
+
+And then I understood he had merely intended a question.  I owned up that
+I was, and accused him in turn of being a Frenchman.  He admitted it.
+Introductions, as it were, thus over, I thought I would order dinner.  I
+ordered it in French.  I am not bragging of my French, I never wanted to
+learn French.  Even as a boy, it was more the idea of others than of
+myself.  I learnt as little as possible.  But I have learnt enough to
+live in places where they can't, or won't, speak anything else.  Left to
+myself, I could have enjoyed a very satisfactory dinner.  I was tired
+with a long day's journey, and hungry.  They cook well at this hotel.  I
+had been looking forward to my dinner for hours and hours.  I had sat
+down in my imagination to a _consomme bisque_, _sole au gratin_, a
+_poulet saute_, and an _omelette au fromage_.
+
+
+
+Waiterkind in the making.
+
+
+It is wrong to let one's mind dwell upon carnal delights; I see that now.
+At the time I was mad about it.  The fool would not even listen to me.  He
+had got it into his garlic-sodden brain that all Englishmen live on beef,
+and nothing but beef.  He swept aside all my suggestions as though they
+had been the prattlings of a foolish child.
+
+"You haf nice biftek.  Not at all done.  Yes?"
+
+"No, I don't," I answered.  "I don't want what the cook of a French
+provincial hotel calls a biftek.  I want something to eat.  I want--"
+Apparently, he understood neither English nor French.
+
+"Yes, yes," he interrupted cheerfully, "with pottitoes."
+
+"With what?" I asked.  I thought for the moment he was suggesting potted
+pigs' feet in the nearest English he could get to it.
+
+"Pottito," he repeated; "boil pottito.  Yes?  And pell hell."
+
+I felt like telling him to go there; I suppose he meant "pale ale."  It
+took me about five minutes to get that beefsteak out of his head.  By the
+time I had done it, I did not care what I had for dinner.  I took _pot-du-
+jour_ and veal.  He added, on his own initiative, a thing that looked
+like a poultice.  I did not try the taste of it.  He explained it was
+"plum poodeen."  I fancy he had made it himself.
+
+This fellow is typical; you meet him everywhere abroad.  He translates
+your bill into English for you, calls ten centimes a penny, calculates
+twelve francs to the pound, and presses a handful of sous affectionately
+upon you as change for a napoleon.
+
+The cheating waiter is common to all countries, though in Italy and
+Belgium he flourishes, perhaps, more than elsewhere.  But the British
+waiter, when detected, becomes surly--does not take it nicely.  The
+foreign waiter is amiable about it--bears no malice.  He is grieved,
+maybe, at your language, but that is because he is thinking of you--the
+possible effect of it upon your future.  To try and stop you, he offers
+you another four sous.  The story is told of a Frenchman who, not knowing
+the legal fare, adopted the plan of doling out pennies to a London cabman
+one at a time, continuing until the man looked satisfied.  Myself, I
+doubt the story.  From what I know of the London cabman, I can see him
+leaning down still, with out-stretched hand, the horse between the shafts
+long since dead, the cab chockfull of coppers, and yet no expression of
+satiety upon his face.
+
+But the story would appear to have crossed the Channel, and to have
+commended itself to the foreign waiter--especially to the railway
+refreshment-room waiter.  He doles out sous to the traveller, one at a
+time, with the air of a man who is giving away the savings of a lifetime.
+If, after five minutes or so, you still appear discontented he goes away
+quite suddenly.  You think he has gone to open another chest of
+half-pence, but when a quarter of an hour has passed and he does not
+reappear, you inquire about him amongst the other waiters.
+
+A gloom at once falls upon them.  You have spoken of the very thing that
+has been troubling them.  He used to be a waiter here once--one might
+almost say until quite recently.  As to what has become of him--ah! there
+you have them.  If in the course of their chequered career they ever come
+across him, they will mention to him that you are waiting for him.
+Meanwhile a stentorian-voiced official is shouting that your train is on
+the point of leaving.  You console yourself with the reflection that it
+might have been more.  It always might have been more; sometimes it is.
+
+
+
+His Little Mistakes.
+
+
+A waiter at the Gare du Nord, in Brussels, on one occasion pressed upon
+me a five-franc piece, a small Turkish coin the value of which was
+unknown to me, and remains so to this day, a distinctly bad two francs,
+and from a quarter of a pound to six ounces of centimes, as change for a
+twenty-franc note, after deducting the price of a cup of coffee.  He put
+it down with the air of one subscribing to a charity.  We looked at one
+another.  I suppose I must have conveyed to him the impression of being
+discontented.  He drew a purse from his pocket.  The action suggested
+that, for the purpose of satisfying my inordinate demands, he would be
+compelled to draw upon his private resources; but it did not move me.
+Abstracting reluctantly a fifty-centime piece, he added it to the heap
+upon the table.
+
+I suggested his taking a seat, as at this rate it seemed likely we should
+be doing business together for some time.  I think he gathered I was not
+a fool.  Hitherto he had been judging, I suppose, purely from
+appearances.  But he was not in the least offended.
+
+"Ah!" he cried, with a cheery laugh, "Monsieur comprend!"  He swept the
+whole nonsense back into his bag and gave me the right change.  I slipped
+my arm through his and insisted upon the pleasure of his society, until I
+had examined each and every coin.  He went away chuckling, and told
+another waiter all about it.  They both of them bowed to me as I went
+out, and wished me a pleasant journey.  I left them still chuckling.  A
+British waiter would have been sulky all the afternoon.
+
+The waiter who insists upon mistaking you for the heir of all the
+Rothschilds used to cost me dear when I was younger.  I find the best
+plan is to take him in hand at the beginning and disillusion him; sweep
+aside his talk of '84 Perrier Jouet, followed by a '79 Chateau Lafite,
+and ask him, as man to man, if he can conscientiously recommend the Saint
+Julien at two-and-six.  After that he settles down to his work and talks
+sense.
+
+The fatherly waiter is sometimes a comfort.  You feel that he knows best.
+Your instinct is to address him as "Uncle."  But you remember yourself in
+time.  When you are dining a lady, however, and wish to appear important,
+he is apt to be in the way.  It seems, somehow, to be his dinner.  You
+have a sense almost of being _de trop_.
+
+The greatest insult you can offer a waiter is to mistake him for your
+waiter.  You think he is your waiter--there is the bald head, the black
+side-whiskers, the Roman nose.  But your waiter had blue eyes, this man
+soft hazel.  You had forgotten to notice the eyes.  You bar his progress
+and ask him for the red pepper.  The haughty contempt with which he
+regards you is painful to bear.  It is as if you had insulted a lady.  He
+appears to be saying the same thing:
+
+"I think you have made a mistake.  You are possibly confusing me with
+somebody else; I have not the honour of your acquaintance."
+
+
+
+How to insult him.
+
+
+I do not wish it to be understood that I am in the habit of insulting
+ladies, but occasionally I have made an innocent mistake, and have met
+with some such response.  The wrong waiter conveys to me precisely the
+same feeling of humiliation.
+
+"I will send your waiter to you," he answers.  His tone implies that
+there are waiters and waiters; some may not mind what class of person
+they serve: others, though poor, have their self-respect.  It is clear to
+you now why your waiter is keeping away from you; the man is ashamed of
+being your waiter.  He is watching, probably, for an opportunity to
+approach you when nobody is looking.  The other waiter finds him for you.
+He was hiding behind a screen.
+
+"Table forty-two wants you," the other tells him.  The tone of voice
+adds:
+
+"If you like to encourage this class of customer that is your business;
+but don't ask me to have anything to do with him."
+
+Even the waiter has his feelings.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+The everlasting Newness of Woman.
+
+
+An Oriental visitor was returning from our shores to his native land.
+
+"Well," asked the youthful diplomatist who had been told off to show him
+round, as on the deck of the steamer they shook hands, "what do you now
+think of England?"
+
+"Too much woman," answered the grave Orientalist, and descended to his
+cabin.
+
+The young diplomatist returned to the shore thoughtful, and later in the
+day a few of us discussed the matter in a far-off, dimly-lighted corner
+of the club smoking-room.
+
+Has the pendulum swung too far the other way?  Could there be truth in
+our Oriental friend's terse commentary?  The eternal feminine!  The
+Western world has been handed over to her.  The stranger from Mars or
+Jupiter would describe us as a hive of women, the sober-clad male being
+retained apparently on condition of its doing all the hard work and
+making itself generally useful.  Formerly it was the man who wore the
+fine clothes who went to the shows.  To-day it is the woman gorgeously
+clad for whom the shows are organized.  The man dressed in a serviceable
+and unostentatious, not to say depressing, suit of black accompanies her
+for the purpose of carrying her cloak and calling her carriage.  Among
+the working classes life, of necessity, remains primitive; the law of the
+cave is still, with slight modification, the law of the slum.  But in
+upper and middle-class circles the man is now the woman's servant.
+
+I remember being present while a mother of my acquaintance was instilling
+into the mind of her little son the advantages of being born a man.  A
+little girl cousin was about to spend a week with him.  It was impressed
+upon him that if she showed a liking for any of his toys, he was at once
+to give them up to her.
+
+"But why, mamma?" he demanded, evidently surprised.
+
+"Because, my dear, you are a little man."
+
+Should she break them, he was not to smack her head or kick her--as his
+instinct might prompt him to do.  He was just to say:
+
+"Oh, it is of no consequence at all," and to look as if he meant it.
+
+
+
+Doctor says she is not to be bothered.
+
+
+She was always to choose the game--to have the biggest apple.  There was
+much more of a similar nature.  It was all because he was a little man
+and she was a little woman.  At the end he looked up, puzzled:
+
+"But don't she do anything, 'cos she's a little girl?"
+
+It was explained to him that she didn't.  By right of being born a little
+girl she was exempt from all duty.
+
+Woman nowadays is not taking any duty.  She objects to housekeeping; she
+calls it domestic slavery, and feels she was intended for higher things.
+What higher things she does not condescend to explain.  One or two wives
+of my acquaintance have persuaded their husbands that these higher things
+are all-important.  The home has been given up.  In company with other
+strivers after higher things, they live now in dismal barracks differing
+but little from a glorified Bloomsbury lodging-house.  But they call them
+"Mansions" or "Courts," and seem proud of the address.  They are not
+bothered with servants--with housekeeping.  The idea of the modern woman
+is that she is not to be bothered with anything.  I remember the words
+with which one of these ladies announced her departure from her bothering
+home.
+
+"Oh, well, I'm tired of trouble," she confided to another lady, "so I've
+made up my mind not to have any more of it."
+
+Artemus Ward tells us of a man who had been in prison for twenty years.
+Suddenly a bright idea occurred to him; he opened the window and got out.
+Here have we poor, foolish mortals been imprisoned in this troublesome
+world for Lord knows how many millions of years.  We have got so used to
+trouble we thought there was no help for it.  We have told ourselves that
+"Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards."  We imagined the only
+thing to be done was to bear it philosophically.  Why did not this bright
+young creature come along before--show us the way out.  All we had to do
+was to give up the bothering home and the bothering servants, and go into
+a "Mansion" or a "Court."
+
+It seems that you leave trouble outside--in charge of the hall-porter,
+one supposes.  He ties it up for you as the Commissionaire of the Army
+and Navy Stores ties up your dog.  If you want it again, you ask for it
+as you come out.  Small wonder that the "Court" and "Mansion" are growing
+in popularity every day.
+
+
+
+That "Higher Life."
+
+
+They have nothing to do now all day long, these soaring wives of whom I
+am speaking.  They would scorn to sew on a shirt-button even.  Are there
+not other women--of an inferior breed--specially fashioned by Providence
+for the doing of such slavish tasks?  They have no more bothers of any
+kind.  They are free to lead the higher life.  What I am waiting for is a
+glimpse of the higher life.  One of them, it is true, has taken up the
+violin.  Another of them is devoting her emancipation to poker work.  A
+third is learning skirt-dancing.  Are these the "higher things" for which
+women are claiming freedom from all duty?  And, if so, is there not
+danger that the closing of our homes may lead to the crowding up of the
+world with too much higher things?
+
+May there not, by the time all bothers have been removed from woman's
+path, be too many amateur violinists in the world, too many
+skirt-dancers, too much poker work?  If not, what are they? these "higher
+things," for which so many women are demanding twenty-four hours a day
+leisure.  I want to know.
+
+One lady of my acquaintance is a Poor Law Guardian and secretary to a
+labour bureau.  But then she runs a house with two servants, four
+children, and a husband, and appears to be so used to bothers that she
+would feel herself lost without them.  You can do this kind of work
+apparently even when you are bothered with a home.  It is the
+skirt-dancing and the poker work that cannot brook rivalry.  The modern
+woman has begun to find children a nuisance; they interfere with her
+development.  The mere man, who has written his poems, painted his
+pictures, composed his melodies, fashioned his philosophies, in the midst
+of life's troubles and bothers, grows nervous thinking what this new
+woman must be whose mind is so tremendous that the whole world must be
+shut up, so to speak, sent to do its business out of her sight and
+hearing, lest her attention should be distracted.
+
+An optimistic friend of mine tells me not to worry myself; tells me that
+it is going to come out all right in the end.  Woman just now, he
+contends, is passing through her college period.  The school life of
+strict surveillance is for ever done with.  She is now the young
+Freshwoman.  The bothering lessons are over, the bothering schoolmaster
+she has said good-bye to.  She has her latchkey and is "on her own."
+There are still some bothering rules about being in at twelve o'clock,
+and so many attendances each term at chapel.  She is indignant.  This
+interferes with her idea that life is to be one long orgie of
+self-indulgence, of pleasure.  The college period will pass--is passing.
+Woman will go out into the world, take her place there, discover that
+bothers were not left behind in the old schoolhouse, will learn that life
+has duties, responsibilities, will take up her burden side by side with
+man, will accomplish her destiny.
+
+
+
+Is there anything left for her to learn?
+
+
+Meanwhile, however, she is having a good time--some people think too good
+a time.  She wants the best of both.  She demands the joys of
+independence together with freedom from all work--slavery she calls it.
+The servants are not to be allowed to bother her, the children are not to
+be allowed to bother her, her husband is not to be allowed to bother her.
+She is to be free to lead the higher life.  My dear lady, we all want to
+lead the higher life.  I don't want to write these articles.  I want
+somebody else to bother about my rates and taxes, my children's boots,
+while I sit in an easy-chair and dream about the wonderful books I am
+going to write, if only a stupid public would let me.  Tommy Smith of
+Brixton feels that he was intended for higher things.  He does not want
+to be wasting his time in an office from nine to six adding up figures.
+His proper place in life is that of Prime Minister or Field Marshal: he
+feels it.  Do you think the man has no yearning for higher things?  Do
+you think we like the office, the shop, the factory?  We ought to be
+writing poetry, painting pictures, the whole world admiring us.  You seem
+to imagine your man goes off every morning to a sort of City picnic, has
+eight hours' fun--which he calls work--and then comes home to annoy you
+with chatter about dinner.
+
+It is the old fable reversed; man said woman had nothing to do all day
+but to enjoy herself.  Making a potato pie!  What sort of work was that?
+Making a potato pie was a lark; anybody could make a potato pie.
+
+So the woman said, "Try it," and took the man's spade and went out into
+the field, and left him at home to make that pie.
+
+The man discovered that potato pies took a bit more making than he had
+reckoned--found that running the house and looking after the children was
+not quite the merry pastime he had argued.  Man was a fool.
+
+Now it is the woman who talks without thinking.  How did she like hoeing
+the potato patch?  Hard work, was it not, my dear lady?  Made your back
+ache?  It came on to rain and you got wet.
+
+I don't see that it very much matters which of you hoes the potato patch,
+which of you makes the potato pie.  Maybe the hoeing of the patch demands
+more muscle--is more suited to the man.  Maybe the making of the pie may
+be more in your department.  But, as I have said, I cannot see that this
+matter is of importance.  The patch has to be hoed, the pie to be cooked;
+the one cannot do the both.  Settle it between you, and, having settled
+it, agree to do each your own work free from this everlasting nagging.
+
+I know, personally, three ladies who have exchanged the woman's work for
+the man's.  One was deserted by her husband, and left with two young
+children.  She hired a capable woman to look after the house, and joined
+a ladies' orchestra as pianist at two pounds a week.  She now earns four,
+and works twelve hours a day.  The husband of the second fell ill.  She
+set him to write letters and run errands, which was light work that he
+could do, and started a dressmaker's business.  The third was left a
+widow without means.  She sent her three children to boarding-school, and
+opened a tea-room.  I don't know how they talked before, but I know that
+they do not talk now as though earning the income was a sort of round
+game.
+
+
+
+When they have tried it the other way round.
+
+
+On the Continent they have gone deliberately to work, one would imagine,
+to reverse matters.  Abroad woman is always where man ought to be, and
+man where most ladies would prefer to meet with women.  The ladies _garde-
+robe_ is superintended by a superannuated sergeant of artillery.  When I
+want to curl my moustache, say, I have to make application to a superb
+golden-haired creature, who stands by and watches me with an interested
+smile.  I would be much happier waited on by the superannuated sergeant,
+and my wife tells me she could very well spare him.  But it is the law of
+the land.  I remember the first time I travelled with my daughter on the
+Continent.  In the morning I was awakened by a piercing scream from her
+room.  I struggled into my pyjamas, and rushed to her assistance.  I
+could not see her.  I could see nothing but a muscular-looking man in a
+blue blouse with a can of hot water in one hand and a pair of boots in
+the other.  He appeared to be equally bewildered with myself at the sight
+of the empty bed.  From a cupboard in the corner came a wail of distress:
+
+"Oh, do send that horrid man away.  What's he doing in my room?"
+
+I explained to her afterwards that the chambermaid abroad is always an
+active and willing young man.  The foreign girl fills in her time
+bricklaying and grooming down the horses.  It is a young and charming
+lady who serves you when you enter the tobacconist's.  She doesn't
+understand tobacco, is unsympathetic; with Mr. Frederic Harrison, regards
+smoking as a degrading and unclean habit; cannot see, herself, any
+difference between shag and Mayblossom, seeing that they are both the
+same price; thinks you fussy.  The corset shop is run by a most
+presentable young man in a Vandyck beard.  The wife runs the restaurant;
+the man does the cooking, and yet the woman has not reached freedom from
+bother.
+
+
+
+A brutal suggestion.
+
+
+It sounds brutal, but perhaps woman was not intended to live free from
+all bothers.  Perhaps even the higher life--the skirt-dancing and the
+poker work--has its bothers.  Perhaps woman was intended to take her
+share of the world's work--of the world's bothers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+Why I hate Heroes.
+
+
+When I was younger, reading the popular novel used to make me sad.  I
+find it vexes others also.  I was talking to a bright young girl upon the
+subject not so very long ago.
+
+"I just hate the girl in the novel," she confessed.  "She makes me feel
+real bad.  If I don't think of her I feel pleased with myself, and good;
+but when I read about her--well, I'm crazy.  I would not mind her being
+smart, sometimes.  We can all of us say the right thing, now and then.
+This girl says them straight away, all the time.  She don't have to dig
+for them even; they come crowding out of her.  There never happens a time
+when she stands there feeling like a fool and knowing that she looks it.
+As for her hair: 'pon my word, there are days when I believe it is a wig.
+I'd like to get behind her and give it just one pull.  It curls of its
+own accord.  She don't seem to have any trouble with it.  Look at this
+mop of mine.  I've been working at it for three-quarters of an hour this
+morning; and now I would not laugh, not if you were to tell me the
+funniest thing, you'd ever heard, for fear it would come down again.  As
+for her clothes, they make me tired.  She don't possess a frock that does
+not fit her to perfection; she doesn't have to think about them.  You
+would imagine she went into the garden and picked them off a tree.  She
+just slips it on and comes down, and then--my stars!  All the other women
+in the room may just as well go to bed and get a good night's rest for
+all the chance they've got.  It isn't that she's beautiful.  From what
+they tell you about her, you might fancy her a freak.  Looks don't appear
+to matter to her; she gets there anyhow.  I tell you she just makes me
+boil."
+
+Allowing for the difference between the masculine and feminine outlook,
+this is precisely how I used to feel when reading of the hero.  He was
+not always good; sometimes he hit the villain harder than he had
+intended, and then he was sorry--when it was too late, blamed himself
+severely, and subscribed towards the wreath.  Like the rest of us, he
+made mistakes; occasionally married the wrong girl.  But how well he did
+everything!--does still for the matter of that, I believe.  Take it that
+he condescends to play cricket!  He never scores less than a hundred--does
+not know how to score less than a hundred, wonders how it could be done,
+supposing, for example, you had an appointment and wanted to catch an
+early train.  I used to play cricket myself, but I could always stop at
+ten or twenty.  There have been times when I have stopped at even less.
+
+It is the same with everything he puts his hand to.  Either he does not
+care for boating at all, or, as a matter of course, he pulls stroke in
+the University Boat-race; and then takes the train on to Henley and wins
+the Diamond Sculls so easily that it hardly seems worth while for the
+other fellow to have started.  Were I living in Novel-land, and had I
+entered for the Diamond Sculls, I should put it to my opponent before the
+word was given to us to go.
+
+"One minute!" I should have called out to him.  "Are you the hero of this
+novel, or, like myself, only one of the minor characters?  Because, if
+you are the hero you go on; don't you wait for me.  I shall just pull as
+far as the boathouse and get myself a cup of tea."
+
+
+
+Because it always seems to be his Day.
+
+
+There is no sense of happy medium about the hero of the popular novel.  He
+cannot get astride a horse without its going off and winning a
+steeplechase against the favourite.  The crowd in Novel-land appears to
+have no power of observation.  It worries itself about the odds,
+discusses records, reads the nonsense published by the sporting papers.
+Were I to find myself on a racecourse in Novel-land I should not trouble
+about the unessential; I should go up to the bookie who looked as if he
+had the most money, and should say to him:
+
+"Don't shout so loud; you are making yourself hoarse.  Just listen to me.
+Who's the hero of this novel?  Oh, that's he, is it?  The heavy-looking
+man on the little brown horse that keeps coughing and is suffering
+apparently from bone spavin?  Well, what are the odds against his winning
+by ten lengths?  A thousand to one!  Very well!  Have you got a
+bag?--Good.  Here's twenty-seven pounds in gold and eighteen shillings in
+silver.  Coat and waistcoat, say another ten shillings.  Shirt and
+trousers--it's all right, I've got my pyjamas on underneath--say seven
+and six.  Boots--we won't quarrel--make it five bob.  That's twenty-nine
+pounds and sixpence, isn't it?  In addition here's a mortgage on the
+family estate, which I've had made out in blank, an I O U for fourteen
+pounds which has been owing to me now for some time, and this bundle of
+securities which, strictly speaking, belong to my Aunt Jane.  You keep
+that little lot till after the race, and we will call it in round
+figures, five hundred pounds."
+
+That single afternoon would thus bring me in five hundred thousand
+pounds--provided the bookie did not blow his brains out.
+
+Backers in Novel-land do not seem to me to know their way about.  If the
+hero of the popular novel swims at all, it is not like an ordinary human
+being that he does it.  You never meet him in a swimming-bath; he never
+pays ninepence, like the rest of us, for a machine.  He goes out at
+uncanny hours, generally accompanied by a lady friend, with whom the
+while swimming he talks poetry and cracks jokes.  Some of us, when we try
+to talk in the sea, fill ourselves up with salt water.  This chap lies on
+his back and carols, and the wild waves, seeing him, go round the other
+way.  At billiards he can give the average sharper forty in a hundred.  He
+does not really want to play; he does it to teach these bad men a lesson.
+He has not handled a cue for years.  He picked up the game when a young
+man in Australia, and it seems to have lingered with him.
+
+He does not have to get up early and worry dumb-bells in his nightshirt;
+he just lies on a sofa in an elegant attitude and muscle comes to him.  If
+his horse declines to jump a hedge, he slips down off the animal's back
+and throws the poor thing over; it saves argument.  If he gets cross and
+puts his shoulder to the massive oaken door, we know there is going to be
+work next morning for the carpenter.  Maybe he is a party belonging to
+the Middle Ages.  Then when he reluctantly challenges the crack fencer of
+Europe to a duel, our instinct is to call out and warn his opponent.
+
+"You silly fool," one feels one wants to say; "why, it is the hero of the
+novel!  You take a friend's advice while you are still alive, and get out
+of it anyway--anyhow.  Apologize--hire a horse and cart, do something.
+You're not going to fight a duel, you're going to commit suicide."
+
+If the hero is a modern young man, and has not got a father, or has only
+something not worth calling a father, then he comes across a
+library--anybody's library does for him.  He passes Sir Walter Scott and
+the "Arabian Nights," and makes a bee-line for Plato; it seems to be an
+instinct with him.  By help of a dictionary he worries it out in the
+original Greek.  This gives him a passion for Greek.
+
+When he has romped through the Greek classics he plays about among the
+Latins.  He spends most of his spare time in that library, and forgets to
+go to tea.
+
+
+
+Because he always "gets there," without any trouble.
+
+
+That is the sort of boy he is.  How I used to hate him!  If he has a
+proper sort of father, then he goes to college.  He does no work: there
+is no need for him to work: everything seems to come to him.  That was
+another grievance of mine against him.  I always had to work a good deal,
+and very little came of it.  He fools around doing things that other men
+would be sent down for; but in his case the professors love him for it
+all the more.  He is the sort of man who can't do wrong.  A fortnight
+before the examination he ties a wet towel round his head.  That is all
+we hear about it.  It seems to be the towel that does it.  Maybe, if the
+towel is not quite up to its work, he will help things on by drinking
+gallons of strong tea.  The tea and the towel combined are irresistible:
+the result is always the senior wranglership.
+
+I used to believe in that wet towel and that strong tea.  Lord! the
+things I used to believe when I was young.  They would make an
+Encyclopaedia of Useless Knowledge.  I wonder if the author of the
+popular novel has ever tried working with a wet towel round his or her
+head: I have.  It is difficult enough to move a yard, balancing a dry
+towel.  A heathen Turk may have it in his blood to do so: the ordinary
+Christian has not got the trick of it.  To carry about a wet towel
+twisted round one's head needs a trained acrobat.  Every few minutes the
+wretched thing works loose.  In darkness and in misery, you struggle to
+get your head out of a clammy towel that clings to you almost with
+passion.  Brain power is wasted in inventing names for that towel--names
+expressive of your feelings with regard to it.  Further time is taken up
+before the glass, fixing the thing afresh.
+
+You return to your books in the wrong temper, the water trickles down
+your nose, runs in rivulets down your back.  Until you have finally flung
+the towel out of the window and rubbed yourself dry, work is impossible.
+The strong tea always gave me indigestion, and made me sleepy.  Until I
+had got over the effects of the tea, attempts at study were useless.
+
+
+
+Because he's so damned clever.
+
+
+But the thing that still irritates me most against the hero of the
+popular novel is the ease with which he learns a modern foreign language.
+Were he a German waiter, a Swiss barber, or a Polish photographer, I
+would not envy him; these people do not have to learn a language.  My
+idea is that they boil down a dictionary, and take two table-spoonsful
+each night before going to bed.  By the time the bottle is finished they
+have the language well into their system.  But he is not.  He is just an
+ordinary Anglo-Saxon, and I don't believe in him.  I walk about for years
+with dictionaries in my pocket.  Weird-looking ladies and gentlemen
+gesticulate and rave at me for months.  I hide myself in lonely places,
+repeating idioms to myself out loud, in the hope that by this means they
+will come readily to me if ever I want them, which I never do.  And,
+after all this, I don't seem to know very much.  This irritating ass, who
+has never left his native suburb, suddenly makes up his mind to travel on
+the Continent.  I find him in the next chapter engaged in complicated
+psychological argument with French or German _savants_.  It appears--the
+author had forgotten to mention it before--that one summer a French, or
+German, or Italian refugee, as the case may happen to be, came to live in
+the hero's street: thus it is that the hero is able to talk fluently in
+the native language of that unhappy refugee.
+
+I remember a melodrama visiting a country town where I was staying.  The
+heroine and child were sleeping peacefully in the customary attic.  For
+some reason not quite clear to me, the villain had set fire to the house.
+He had been complaining through the three preceding acts of the heroine's
+coldness; maybe it was with some idea of warming her.  Escape by way of
+the staircase was impossible.  Each time the poor girl opened the door a
+flame came in and nearly burned her hair off.  It seemed to have been
+waiting for her.
+
+"Thank God!" said the lady, hastily wrapping the child in a sheet, "that
+I was brought up a wire walker."
+
+Without a moment's hesitation she opened the attic window and took the
+nearest telegraph wire to the opposite side of the street.
+
+In the same way, apparently, the hero of the popular novel, finding
+himself stranded in a foreign land, suddenly recollects that once upon a
+time he met a refugee, and at once begins to talk.  I have met refugees
+myself.  The only thing they have ever taught me is not to leave my
+brandy flask about.
+
+
+
+And, finally, because I don't believe he's true.
+
+
+I don't believe in these heroes and heroines that cannot keep quiet in a
+foreign language they have taught themselves in an old-world library.  My
+fixed idea is that they muddle along like the rest of us, surprised that
+so few people understand them, begging everyone they meet not to talk so
+quickly.  These brilliant conversations with foreign philosophers!  These
+passionate interviews with foreign countesses!  They fancy they have had
+them.
+
+I crossed once with an English lady from Boulogne to Folkestone.  At
+Folkestone a little French girl--anxious about her train--asked us a
+simple question.  My companion replied to it with an ease that astonished
+herself.  The little French girl vanished; my companion sighed.
+
+"It's so odd," said my companion, "but I seem to know quite a lot of
+French the moment I get back to England."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+How to be Healthy and Unhappy.
+
+
+"They do say," remarked Mrs. Wilkins, as she took the cover off the dish
+and gave a finishing polish to my plate with the cleanest corner of her
+apron, "that 'addicks, leastways in May, ain't, strictly speaking, the
+safest of food.  But then, if you listen to all they say, it seems to me,
+we'd have to give up victuals altogether."
+
+"The haddock, Mrs. Wilkins," I replied, "is a savoury and nourishing
+dish, the 'poor man's steak' I believe it is commonly called.  When I was
+younger, Mrs. Wilkins, they were cheaper.  For twopence one could secure
+a small specimen, for fourpence one of generous proportions.  In the
+halcyon days of youth, when one's lexicon contained not the word failure
+(it has crept into later editions, Mrs. Wilkins, the word it was found
+was occasionally needful), the haddock was of much comfort and support to
+me, a very present help in time of trouble.  In those days a kind friend,
+without intending it, nearly brought about my death by slow starvation.  I
+had left my umbrella in an omnibus, and the season was rainy.  The kind
+rich friend gave me a new umbrella; it was a rich man's umbrella; we made
+an ill-assorted pair.  Its handle was of ivory, imposing in appearance,
+ornamented with a golden snake.
+
+
+
+The unsympathetic Umbrella.
+
+
+"Following my own judgment I should have pawned that umbrella, purchased
+one more suited to my state in life, and 'blued' the difference.  But I
+was fearful of offending my one respectable acquaintance, and for weeks
+struggled on, hampered by this plutocratic appendage.  The humble haddock
+was denied to me.  Tied to this imposing umbrella, how could I haggle
+with fishmongers for haddocks.  At first sight of me--or, rather, of my
+umbrella--they flew to icy cellars, brought up for my inspection soles at
+eighteenpence a pound, recommended me prime parts of salmon, which my
+landlady would have fried in a pan reeking with the mixed remains of pork
+chops, rashers of bacon and cheese.  It was closed to me, the humble
+coffee shop, where for threepence I could have strengthened my soul with
+half a pint of cocoa and four "doorsteps"--satisfactory slices of bread
+smeared with a yellow grease that before the days of County Council
+inspectors they called butter.  You know of them, Mrs. Wilkins?  At sight
+of such nowadays I should turn up my jaded nose.  But those were the days
+of my youth, Mrs. Wilkins.  The scent of a thousand hopes was in my
+nostrils: so they smelt good to me.  The fourpenny beefsteak pie,
+satisfying to the verge of repletion; the succulent saveloy, were not for
+the owner of the ivory-handled umbrella.  On Mondays and Tuesdays,
+perhaps, I could enjoy life at the rate of five hundred a year--clean
+serviette a penny extra, and twopence to the waiter, whose income must
+have been at least four times my own.  But from Wednesday to Saturday I
+had to wander in the wilderness of back streets and silent squares
+dinnerless, where there were not even to be found locusts and wild honey.
+
+"It was, as I have said, a rainy season, and an umbrella of some sort was
+a necessity.  Fortunately--or I might not be sitting here, Mrs. Wilkins,
+talking to you now--my one respectable acquaintance was called away to
+foreign lands, and that umbrella I promptly put 'up the spout.'  You
+understand me?"
+
+Mrs. Wilkins admitted she did, but was of opinion that twenty-five per
+cent., to say nothing of the halfpenny for the ticket every time, was a
+wicked imposition.
+
+"It did not trouble me, Mrs. Wilkins," I replied, "in this particular
+instance.  It was my determination never to see that umbrella again.  The
+young man behind the counter seemed suspicious, and asked where I got it
+from.  I told him that a friend had given it to me."
+
+"'Did he know that he had given it to you?" demanded the young man.
+
+"Upon which I gave him a piece of my mind concerning the character of
+those who think evil of others, and he gave me five and six, and said he
+should know me again; and I purchased an umbrella suited to my rank and
+station, and as fine a haddock as I have ever tasted with the balance,
+which was sevenpence, for I was feeling hungry.
+
+"The haddock is an excellent fish, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "and if, as you
+observe, we listened to all that was said we'd be hungrier at forty, with
+a balance to our credit at the bank, than ever we were at twenty, with
+'no effects' beyond a sound digestion."
+
+
+
+A Martyr to Health.
+
+
+"There was a gent in Middle Temple Lane," said Mrs. Wilkins, "as I used
+to do for.  It's my belief as 'e killed 'imself worrying twenty-four
+hours a day over what 'e called 'is 'ygiene.  Leastways 'e's dead and
+buried now, which must be a comfort to 'imself, feeling as at last 'e's
+out of danger.  All 'is time 'e spent taking care of 'imself--didn't seem
+to 'ave a leisure moment in which to live.  For 'alf an hour every
+morning 'e'd lie on 'is back on the floor, which is a draughty place, I
+always 'old, at the best of times, with nothing on but 'is pyjamas,
+waving 'is arms and legs about, and twisting 'imself into shapes
+unnatural to a Christian.  Then 'e found out that everything 'e'd been
+doing on 'is back was just all wrong, so 'e turned over and did tricks on
+'is stomach--begging your pardon for using the word--that you'd 'ave
+thought more fit and proper to a worm than to a man.  Then all that was
+discovered to be a mistake.  There don't seem nothing certain in these
+matters.  That's the awkward part of it, so it seems to me.  'E got
+'imself a machine, by means of which 'e'd 'ang 'imself up to the wall,
+and behave for all the world like a beetle with a pin stuck through 'im,
+poor thing.  It used to give me the shudders to catch sight of 'im
+through the 'alf-open door.  For that was part of the game: you 'ad to
+'ave a current of air through the room, the result of which was that for
+six months out of the year 'e'd be coughing and blowing 'is nose from
+morning to night.  It was the new treatment, so 'e'd explain to me.  You
+got yourself accustomed to draughts so that they didn't 'urt you, and if
+you died in the process that only proved that you never ought to 'ave
+been born.
+
+"Then there came in this new Japanese business, and 'e'd 'ire a little
+smiling 'eathen to chuck 'im about 'is room for 'alf an hour every
+morning after breakfast.  It got on my nerves after a while 'earing 'im
+being bumped on the floor every minute, or flung with 'is 'ead into the
+fire-place.  But 'e always said it was doing 'im good.  'E'd argue that
+it freshened up 'is liver.  It was 'is liver that 'e seemed to live
+for--didn't appear to 'ave any other interest in life.  It was the same
+with 'is food.  One year it would be nothing but meat, and next door to
+raw at that.  One of them medical papers 'ad suddenly discovered that we
+were intended to be a sort of wild beast.  The wonder to me is that 'e
+didn't go out 'unting chickens with a club, and bring 'em 'ome and eat
+'em on the mat without any further fuss.  For drink it would be boiling
+water that burnt my fingers merely 'andling the glass.  Then some other
+crank came out with the information that every other crank was
+wrong--which, taken by itself, sounds natural enough--that meat was fatal
+to the 'uman system.  Upon that 'e becomes all at once a raging, tearing
+vegetarian, and trouble enough I 'ad learning twenty different ways of
+cooking beans, which didn't make, so far as I could ever see, the
+slightest difference--beans they were, and beans they tasted like,
+whether you called them _ragout a la maison_, or cutlets _a la
+Pompadour_.  But it seemed to please 'im.
+
+
+
+He was never pig-headed.
+
+
+"Then vegetarianism turned out to be the mistake of our lives.  It seemed
+we made an error giving up monkeys' food.  That was our natural victuals;
+nuts with occasional bananas.  As I used to tell 'im, if that was so,
+then for all we 'ad got out of it we might just as well have stopped up a
+tree--saved rent and shoe leather.  But 'e was one of that sort that
+don't seem able to 'elp believing everything they read in print.  If one
+of those papers 'ad told 'im to live on the shells and throw away the
+nuts, 'e'd have made a conscientious endeavour to do so, contending that
+'is failure to digest them was merely the result of vicious
+training--didn't seem to 'ave any likes or dislikes of 'is own.  You
+might 'ave thought 'e was just a bit of public property made to be
+experimented upon.
+
+"One of the daily papers interviewed an old gent, as said 'e was a
+'undred, and I will say from 'is picture as any'ow 'e looked it.  'E said
+it was all the result of never 'aving swallowed anything 'ot, upon which
+my gentleman for a week lives on cold porridge, if you'll believe me;
+although myself I'd rather 'ave died at fifty and got it over.  Then
+another paper dug up from somewhere a sort of animated corpse that said
+was a 'undred and two, and attributed the unfortunate fact to 'is always
+'aving 'ad 'is food as 'ot as 'e could swallow it.  A bit of sense did
+begin to dawn upon 'im then, but too late in the day, I take it.  'E'd
+played about with 'imself too long.  'E died at thirty-two, looking to
+all appearance sixty, and you can't say as 'ow it was the result of not
+taking advice."
+
+
+
+Only just in time.
+
+
+"On this subject of health we are much too ready to follow advice," I
+agreed.  "A cousin of mine, Mrs. Wilkins, had a wife who suffered
+occasionally from headache.  No medicine relieved her of them--not
+altogether.  And one day by chance she met a friend who said: 'Come
+straight with me to Dr. Blank,' who happened to be a specialist famous
+for having invented a new disease that nobody until the year before had
+ever heard of.  She accompanied her friend to Dr. Blank, and in less than
+ten minutes he had persuaded her that she had got this new disease, and
+got it badly; and that her only chance was to let him cut her open and
+have it out.  She was a tolerably healthy woman, with the exception of
+these occasional headaches, but from what that specialist said it was
+doubtful whether she would get home alive, unless she let him operate on
+her then and there, and her friend, who appeared delighted, urged her not
+to commit suicide, as it were, by missing her turn.
+
+"The result was she consented, and afterwards went home in a four-wheeled
+cab, and put herself to bed.  Her husband, when he returned in the
+evening and was told, was furious.  He said it was all humbug, and by
+this time she was ready to agree with him.  He put on his hat, and
+started to give that specialist a bit of his mind.  The specialist was
+out, and he had to bottle up his rage until the morning.  By then, his
+wife now really ill for the first time in her life, his indignation had
+reached boiling point.  He was at that specialist's door at half-past
+nine o'clock.  At half-past eleven he came back, also in a four-wheeled
+cab, and day and night nurses for both of them were wired for.  He also,
+it appeared, had arrived at that specialist's door only just in time.
+
+"There's this appendy--whatever they call it," commented Mrs. Wilkins,
+"why a dozen years ago one poor creature out of ten thousand may possibly
+'ave 'ad something wrong with 'is innards.  To-day you ain't 'ardly
+considered respectable unless you've got it, or 'ave 'ad it.  I 'ave no
+patience with their talk.  To listen to some of them you'd think as
+Nature 'adn't made a man--not yet: would never understand the principle
+of the thing till some of these young chaps 'ad shown 'er 'ow to do it."
+
+
+
+How to avoid Everything.
+
+
+"They have now discovered, Mrs. Wilkins," I said, "the germ of old age.
+They are going to inoculate us for it in early youth, with the result
+that the only chance of ever getting rid of our friends will be to give
+them a motor-car.  And maybe it will not do to trust to that for long.
+They will discover that some men's tendency towards getting themselves
+into trouble is due to some sort of a germ.  The man of the future, Mrs.
+Wilkins, will be inoculated against all chance of gas explosions, storms
+at sea, bad oysters, and thin ice.  Science may eventually discover the
+germ prompting to ill-assorted marriages, proneness to invest in the
+wrong stock, uncontrollable desire to recite poetry at evening parties.
+Religion, politics, education--all these things are so much wasted
+energy.  To live happy and good for ever and ever, all we have to do is
+to hunt out these various germs and wring their necks for them--or
+whatever the proper treatment may be.  Heaven, I gather from medical
+science, is merely a place that is free from germs."
+
+"We talk a lot about it," thought Mrs. Wilkins, "but it does not seem to
+me that we are very much better off than before we took to worrying
+ourselves for twenty-four 'ours a day about 'ow we are going to live.
+Lord! to read the advertisements in the papers you would think as 'ow
+flesh and blood was never intended to 'ave any natural ills.  'Do you
+ever 'ave a pain in your back?' because, if so, there's a picture of a
+kind gent who's willing for one and sixpence halfpenny to take it quite
+away from you--make you look forward to scrubbing floors, and standing
+over the wash-tub six 'ours at a stretch like to a beanfeast.  'Do you
+ever feel as though you don't want to get out of bed in the morning?'
+that's all to be cured by a bottle of their stuff--or two at the outside.
+Four children to keep, and a sick 'usband on your 'ands used to get me
+over it when I was younger.  I used to fancy it was just because I was
+tired.
+
+
+
+The one Cure-All.
+
+
+"There's some of them seem to think," continued Mrs. Wilkins, "that if
+you don't get all you want out of this world, and ain't so 'appy as
+you've persuaded yourself you ought to be, that it's all because you
+ain't taking the right medicine.  Appears to me there's only one doctor
+as can do for you, all the others talk as though they could, and 'e only
+comes to each of us once, and then 'e makes no charge."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Europe and the bright American Girl.
+
+
+"How does she do it?"
+
+That is what the European girl wants to know.  The American girl!  She
+comes over here, and, as a British matron, reduced to slang by force of
+indignation, once exclaimed to me: "You'd think the whole blessed show
+belonged to her."  The European girl is hampered by her relatives.  She
+has to account for her father: to explain away, if possible, her
+grandfather.  The American girl sweeps them aside:
+
+"Don't you worry about them," she says to the Lord Chamberlain.  "It's
+awfully good of you, but don't you fuss yourself.  I'm looking after my
+old people.  That's my department.  What I want you to do is just to
+listen to what I am saying and then hustle around.  I can fill up your
+time all right by myself."
+
+Her father may be a soap-boiler, her grandmother may have gone out
+charing.
+
+"That's all right," she says to her Ambassador: "They're not coming.  You
+just take my card and tell the King that when he's got a few minutes to
+spare I'll be pleased to see him."
+
+And the extraordinary thing is that, a day or two afterwards, the
+invitation arrives.
+
+A modern writer has said that "I'm Murrican" is the _Civis Romanus sum_
+of the present-day woman's world.  The late King of Saxony, did, I
+believe, on one occasion make a feeble protest at being asked to receive
+the daughter of a retail bootmaker.  The young lady, nonplussed for the
+moment, telegraphed to her father in Detroit.  The answer came back next
+morning: "Can't call it selling--practically giving them away.  See
+Advertisement."  The lady was presented as the daughter of an eminent
+philanthropist.
+
+It is due to her to admit that, taking her as a class, the American girl
+is a distinct gain to European Society.  Her influence is against
+convention and in favour of simplicity.  One of her greatest charms, in
+the eyes of the European man, is that she listens to him.  I cannot say
+whether it does her any good.  Maybe she does not remember it all, but
+while you are talking she does give you her attention.  The English woman
+does not always.  She greets you pleasantly enough:
+
+"I've so often wanted to meet you," she says, "must you really go?"
+
+It strikes you as sudden: you had no intention of going for hours.  But
+the hint is too plain to be ignored.  You are preparing to agree that you
+really must when, looking round, you gather that the last remark was not
+addressed to you, but to another gentleman who is shaking hands with her:
+
+"Now, perhaps we shall be able to talk for five minutes," she says.  "I've
+so often wanted to say that I shall never forgive you.  You have been
+simply horrid."
+
+Again you are confused, until you jump to the conclusion that the latter
+portion of the speech is probably intended for quite another party with
+whom, at the moment, her back towards you, she is engaged in a whispered
+conversation.  When he is gone she turns again to you.  But the varied
+expressions that pass across her face while you are discussing with her
+the disadvantages of Protection, bewilder you.  When, explaining your own
+difficulty in arriving at a conclusion, you remark that Great Britain is
+an island, she roguishly shakes her head.  It is not that she has
+forgotten her geography, it is that she is conducting a conversation by
+signs with a lady at the other end of the room.  When you observe that
+the working classes must be fed, she smiles archly while murmuring:
+
+"Oh, do you really think so?"
+
+You are about to say something strong on the subject of dumping.
+Apparently she has disappeared.  You find that she is reaching round
+behind you to tap a new arrival with her fan.
+
+
+
+She has the Art of Listening.
+
+
+Now, the American girl looks at you, and just listens to you with her
+eyes fixed on you all the time.  You gather that, as far as she is
+concerned, the rest of the company are passing shadows.  She wants to
+hear what you have to say about Bi-metallism: her trouble is lest she may
+miss a word of it.  From a talk with an American girl one comes away with
+the conviction that one is a brilliant conversationalist, who can hold a
+charming woman spell-bound.  This may not be good for one: but while it
+lasts, the sensation is pleasant.
+
+Even the American girl cannot, on all occasions, sweep from her path the
+cobwebs of old-world etiquette.  Two American ladies told me a sad tale
+of things that had happened to them not long ago in Dresden.  An officer
+of rank and standing invited them to breakfast with him on the ice.  Dames
+and nobles of the _plus haut ton_ would be there.  It is a social
+function that occurs every Sunday morning in Dresden during the skating
+season.  The great lake in the Grosser Garten is covered with all sorts
+and conditions of people.  Prince and commoner circle and recircle round
+one another.  But they do not mix.  The girls were pleased.  They secured
+the services of an elderly lady, the widow of an analytical chemist:
+unfortunately, she could not skate.  They wrapped her up and put her in a
+sledge.  While they were in the _garde robe_ putting on their skates, a
+German gentleman came up and bowed to them.
+
+He was a nice young man of prepossessing appearance and amiable manners.
+They could not call to mind his name, but remembered having met him,
+somewhere, and on more than one occasion.  The American girl is always
+sociable: they bowed and smiled, and said it was a fine day.  He replied
+with volubility, and helped them down on to the ice.  He was really most
+attentive.  They saw their friend, the officer of noble family, and, with
+the assistance of the German gentleman, skated towards him.  He glided
+past them.  They thought that maybe he did not know enough to stop, so
+they turned and skated after him.  They chased him three times round the
+pond and then, feeling tired, eased up and took counsel together.
+
+"I'm sure he must have seen us," said the younger girl.  "What does he
+mean by it?"
+
+"Well, I have not come down here to play forfeits," said the other,
+"added to which I want my breakfast.  You wait here a minute, I'll go and
+have it out with him."
+
+He was standing only a dozen yards away.  Alone, though not a good
+performer on the ice, she contrived to cover half the distance dividing
+them.  The officer, perceiving her, came to her assistance and greeted
+her with effusion.
+
+
+
+The Republican Idea in practice.
+
+
+"Oh," said the lady, who was feeling indignant, "I thought maybe you had
+left your glasses at home."
+
+"I am sorry," said the officer, "but it is impossible."
+
+"What's impossible?" demanded the lady.
+
+"That I can be seen speaking to you," declared the officer, "while you
+are in company with that--that person."
+
+"What person?"  She thought maybe he was alluding to the lady in the
+sledge.  The chaperon was not showy, but, what is better, she was good.
+And, anyhow, it was the best the girls had been able to do.  So far as
+they were concerned, they had no use for a chaperon.  The idea had been a
+thoughtful concession to European prejudice.
+
+"The person in knickerbockers," explained the officer.
+
+"Oh, _that_," exclaimed the lady, relieved: "he just came up and made
+himself agreeable while we were putting on our skates.  We have met him
+somewhere, but I can't exactly fix him for the moment."
+
+"You have met him possibly at Wiesman's, in the Pragerstrasse: he is one
+of the attendants there," said the officer.
+
+The American girl is Republican in her ideas, but she draws the line at
+hairdressers.  In theory it is absurd: the hairdresser is a man and a
+brother: but we are none of us logical all the way.  It made her mad, the
+thought that she had been seen by all Dresden Society skating with a
+hairdresser.
+
+"Well," she said, "I do call that impudence.  Why, they wouldn't do that
+even in Chicago."
+
+And she returned to where the hairdresser was illustrating to her friend
+the Dutch roll, determined to explain to him, as politely as possible,
+that although the free and enlightened Westerner has abolished social
+distinctions, he has not yet abolished them to that extent.
+
+Had he been a commonplace German hairdresser he would have understood
+English, and all might have been easy.  But to the "classy" German
+hairdresser, English is not so necessary, and the American ladies had
+reached, as regards their German, only the "improving" stage.  In her
+excitement she confused the subjunctive and the imperative, and told him
+that he "might" go.  He had no wish to go; he assured them--so they
+gathered--that his intention was to devote the morning to their service.
+He must have been a stupid man, but it is a type occasionally
+encountered.  Two pretty women had greeted his advances with apparent
+delight.  They were Americans, and the American girl was notoriously
+unconventional.  He knew himself to be a good-looking young fellow.  It
+did not occur to him that in expressing willingness to dispense with his
+attendance they could be in earnest.
+
+There was nothing for it, so it seemed to the girls, but to request the
+assistance of the officer, who continued to skate round and round them at
+a distance of about ten yards.  So again the elder young lady, seizing
+her opportunity, made appeal.
+
+
+
+What the Soldier dared not do.
+
+
+"I cannot," persisted the officer, who, having been looking forward to a
+morning with two of the prettiest girls in Dresden, was also feeling mad.
+"I dare not be seen speaking to a hairdresser.  You must get rid of him."
+
+"But we can't," said the girl.  "We do not know enough German, and he
+can't, or he won't, understand us.  For goodness sake come and help us.
+We'll be spending the whole morning with him if you don't."
+
+The German officer said he was desolate.  Steps would be taken--later in
+the week--the result of which would probably be to render that young
+hairdresser prematurely bald.  But, meanwhile, beyond skating round and
+round them, for which they did not even feel they wanted to thank him,
+the German officer could do nothing for them.  They tried being rude to
+the hairdresser: he mistook it for American _chic_.  They tried joining
+hands and running away from him, but they were not good skaters, and he
+thought they were trying to show him the cake walk.  They both fell down
+and hurt themselves, and it is difficult to be angry with a man, even a
+hairdresser, when he is doing his best to pick you up and comfort you.
+
+The chaperon was worse than useless.  She was very old.  She had been
+promised her breakfast, but saw no signs of it.  She could not speak
+German; and remembered somewhat late in the day that two young ladies had
+no business to accept breakfast at the hands of German officers: and, if
+they did, at least they might see that they got it.  She appeared to be
+willing to talk about decadence of modern manners to almost any extent,
+but the subject of the hairdresser, and how to get rid of him, only bored
+her.
+
+Their first stroke of luck occurred when the hairdresser, showing them
+the "dropped three," fell down and temporarily stunned himself.  It was
+not kind of them, but they were desperate.  They flew for the bank just
+anyhow, and, scrambling over the grass, gained the restaurant.  The
+officer, overtaking them at the door, led them to the table that had been
+reserved for them, then hastened back to hunt for the chaperon.  The
+girls thought their trouble was over.  Had they glanced behind them their
+joy would have been shorter-lived than even was the case.  The
+hairdresser had recovered consciousness in time to see them waddling over
+the grass.  He thought they were running to fetch him brandy.  When the
+officer returned with the chaperon he found the hairdresser sitting
+opposite to them, explaining that he really was not hurt, and suggesting
+that, as they were there, perhaps they would like something to eat and
+drink.
+
+The girls made one last frantic appeal to the man of buckram and
+pipeclay, but the etiquette of the Saxon Army was inexorable.  It
+transpired that he might kill the hairdresser, but nothing else: he must
+not speak to him--not even explain to the poor devil why it was that he
+was being killed.
+
+
+
+Her path of Usefulness.
+
+
+It did not seem quite worth it.  They had some sandwiches and coffee at
+the hairdresser's expense, and went home in a cab: while the chaperon had
+breakfast with the officer of noble family.
+
+The American girl has succeeded in freeing European social intercourse
+from many of its hide-bound conventions.  There is still much work for
+her to do.  But I have faith in her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+Music and the Savage.
+
+
+I never visit a music-hall without reflecting concerning the great future
+there must be before the human race.
+
+How young we are, how very young!  And think of all we have done!  Man is
+still a mere boy.  He has only just within the last half-century been put
+into trousers.  Two thousand years ago he wore long clothes--the Grecian
+robe, the Roman toga.  Then followed the Little Lord Fauntleroy period,
+when he went about dressed in a velvet suit with lace collar and cuffs,
+and had his hair curled for him.  The late lamented Queen Victoria put
+him into trousers.  What a wonderful little man he will be when he is
+grown up!
+
+A clergyman friend of mine told me of a German _Kurhaus_ to which he was
+sent for his sins and his health.  It was a resort, for some reason,
+specially patronized by the more elderly section of the higher English
+middle class.  Bishops were there, suffering from fatty degeneration of
+the heart caused by too close application to study; ancient spinsters of
+good family subject to spasms; gouty retired generals.  Can anybody tell
+me how many men in the British Army go to a general?  Somebody once
+assured me it was five thousand, but that is absurd, on the face of it.
+The British Army, in that case, would have to be counted by millions.
+There are a goodish few American colonels still knocking about.  The
+American colonel is still to be met with here and there by the curious
+traveller, but compared with the retired British general he is an extinct
+species.  In Cheltenham and Brighton and other favoured towns there are
+streets of nothing but retired British generals--squares of retired
+British generals--whole crescents of British generals.  Abroad there are
+_pensions_ with a special scale of charges for British generals.  In
+Switzerland there has even been talk of reserving railway compartments
+"For British Generals Only."  In Germany, when you do not say distinctly
+and emphatically on being introduced that you are not a British general,
+you are assumed, as a matter of course, to be a British general.  During
+the Boer War, when I was residing in a small garrison town on the Rhine,
+German military men would draw me aside and ask of me my own private
+personal views as to the conduct of the campaign.  I would give them my
+views freely, explain to them how I would finish the whole thing in a
+week.
+
+"But how in the face of the enemy's tactics--" one of them would begin.
+
+"Bother the enemy's tactics," I would reply.  "Who cares for tactics?"
+
+"But surely a British general--" they would persist.  "Who's a British
+general?" I would retort, "I am talking to you merely as a plain
+commonsense man, with a head on my shoulders."
+
+They would apologize for their mistake.  But this is leading me away from
+that German _Kurhaus_.
+
+
+
+Recreation for the Higher clergy.
+
+
+My clergyman friend found life there dull.  The generals and the
+spinsters left to themselves might have played cards, but they thought of
+the poor bishops who would have had to look on envious.  The bishops and
+the spinsters might have sung ballads, but the British general after
+dinner does not care for ballads, and had mentioned it.  The bishops and
+the generals might have told each other stories, but could not before the
+ladies.  My clergyman friend stood the awful solemnity of three evenings,
+then cautiously felt his way towards revelry.  He started with an
+intellectual game called "Quotations."  You write down quotations on a
+piece of paper, and the players have to add the author's name.  It roped
+in four old ladies, and the youngest bishop.  One or two generals tried a
+round, but not being familiar with quotations voted the game slow.
+
+The next night my friend tried "Consequences."  "Saucy Miss A. met the
+gay General B. in"--most unlikely places.  "He said."  Really it was
+fortunate that General B. remained too engrossed in the day before
+yesterday's _Standard_ to overhear, or Miss A. could never have again
+faced him.  "And she replied."  The suppressed giggles excited the
+curiosity of the non-players.  Most of the bishops and half the generals
+asked to be allowed to join.  The giggles grew into roars.  Those
+standing out found that they could not read their papers in comfort.
+
+From "Consequences" the descent was easy.  The tables and chairs were
+pushed against the walls, the bishops and the spinsters and the generals
+would sit in a ring upon the floor playing hunt the slipper.  Musical
+chairs made the two hours between bed and dinner the time of the day they
+all looked forward to: the steady trot with every nerve alert, the ear
+listening for the sudden stoppage of the music, the eye seeking with
+artfulness the likeliest chair, the volcanic silence, the mad scramble.
+
+The generals felt themselves fighting their battles over again, the
+spinsters blushed and preened themselves, the bishops took interest in
+proving that even the Church could be prompt of decision and swift of
+movement.  Before the week was out they were playing Puss-in-the-corner;
+ladies feeling young again were archly beckoning to stout deans, to whom
+were returning all the sensations of a curate.  The swiftness with which
+the gouty generals found they could still hobble surprised even
+themselves.
+
+
+
+Why are we so young?
+
+
+But it is in the music-hall, as I have said, that I am most impressed
+with the youthfulness of man.  How delighted we are when the long man in
+the little boy's hat, having asked his short brother a riddle, and before
+he can find time to answer it, hits him over the stomach with an
+umbrella!  How we clap our hands and shout with glee!  It isn't really
+his stomach: it is a bolster tied round his waist--we know that; but
+seeing the long man whack at that bolster with an umbrella gives us
+almost as much joy as if the bolster were not there.
+
+I laugh at the knockabout brothers, I confess, so long as they are on the
+stage; but they do not convince me.  Reflecting on the performance
+afterwards, my dramatic sense revolts against the "plot."  I cannot
+accept the theory of their being brothers.  The difference in size alone
+is a strain upon my imagination.  It is not probable that of two children
+of the same parents one should measure six foot six, and the other five
+foot four.  Even allowing for a freak of nature, and accepting the fact
+that they might be brothers, I do not believe they would remain so
+inseparable.  The short brother would have succeeded before now in losing
+the long brother.  Those continual bangings over the head and stomach
+would have weakened whatever affection the short brother might originally
+have felt towards his long relation.  At least, he would insist upon the
+umbrella being left at home.
+
+"I will go for a walk with you," he might say, "I will stand stock still
+with you in Trafalgar Square in the midst of the traffic while you ask me
+silly riddles, but not if you persist in bringing with you that absurd
+umbrella.  You are too handy with it.  Put it back in the rack before we
+start, or go out by yourself."
+
+Besides, my sense of justice is outraged.  Why should the short brother
+be banged and thumped without reason?  The Greek dramatist would have
+explained to us that the shorter brother had committed a crime against
+the gods.  Aristophanes would have made the longer brother the instrument
+of the Furies.  The riddles he asked would have had bearing upon the
+shorter brother's sin.  In this way the spectator would have enjoyed
+amusement combined with the satisfactory sense that Nemesis is ever
+present in human affairs.  I present the idea, for what it may be worth,
+to the concoctors of knockabout turns.
+
+
+
+Where Brotherly (and Sisterly) Love reigns supreme.
+
+
+The family tie is always strong on the music-hall stage.  The acrobatic
+troupe is always a "Family": Pa, Ma, eight brothers and sisters, and the
+baby.  A more affectionate family one rarely sees.  Pa and Ma are a
+trifle stout, but still active.  Baby, dear little fellow, is full of
+humour.  Ladies do not care to go on the music-hall stage unless they can
+take their sister with them.  I have seen a performance given by eleven
+sisters, all the same size and apparently all the same age.  She must
+have been a wonderful woman--the mother.  They all had golden hair, and
+all wore precisely similar frocks--a charming but _decolletee_
+arrangement--in claret-coloured velvet over blue silk stockings.  So far
+as I could gather, they all had the same young man.  No doubt he found it
+difficult amongst them to make up his mind.
+
+"Arrange it among yourselves," he no doubt had said, "it is quite
+immaterial to me.  You are so much alike, it is impossible that a fellow
+loving one should not love the lot of you.  So long as I marry into the
+family I really don't care."
+
+When a performer appears alone on the music-hall stage it is easy to
+understand why.  His or her domestic life has been a failure.  I listened
+one evening to six songs in succession.  The first two were sung by a
+gentleman.  He entered with his clothes hanging upon him in shreds.  He
+explained that he had just come from an argument with his wife.  He
+showed us the brick with which she had hit him, and the bump at the back
+of his head that had resulted.  The funny man's marriage is never a
+success.  But really this seems to be his own fault.  "She was such a
+lovely girl," he tells us, "with a face--well, you'd hardly call it a
+face, it was more like a gas explosion.  Then she had those wonderful
+sort of eyes that you can see two ways at once with, one of them looks
+down the street, while the other one is watching round the corner.  Can
+see you coming any way.  And her mouth!"
+
+It appears that if she stands anywhere near the curb and smiles, careless
+people mistake her for a pillar-box, and drop letters into her.
+
+"And such a voice!"  We are told it is a perfect imitation of a motor-
+car.  When she laughs people spring into doorways to escape being run
+over.
+
+If he will marry that sort of woman, what can he expect?  The man is
+asking for it.
+
+The lady who followed him also told us a sad story of misplaced trust.
+She also was comic--so the programme assured us.  The humorist appears to
+have no luck.  She had lent her lover money to buy the ring, and the
+licence, and to furnish the flat.  He did buy the ring, and he furnished
+the flat, but it was for another lady.  The audience roared.  I have
+heard it so often asked, "What is humour?"  From observation, I should
+describe it as other people's troubles.
+
+A male performer followed her.  He came on dressed in a night-shirt,
+carrying a baby.  His wife, it seemed, had gone out for the evening with
+the lodger.  That was his joke.  It was the most successful song of the
+whole six.
+
+
+
+The one sure Joke.
+
+
+A philosopher has put it on record that he always felt sad when he
+reflected on the sorrows of humanity.  But when he reflected on its
+amusements he felt sadder still.
+
+Why was it so funny that the baby had the lodger's nose?  We laughed for
+a full minute by the clock.
+
+Why do I love to see a flabby-faced man go behind curtains, and, emerging
+in a wig and a false beard, say that he is now Bismarck or Mr.
+Chamberlain?  I have felt resentment against the Lightning Impersonator
+ever since the days of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.  During that
+summer every Lightning Impersonator ended his show by shouting, while the
+band played the National Anthem, "Queen Victoria!"  He was not a bit like
+Queen Victoria.  He did not even, to my thinking, look a lady; but at
+once I had to stand up in my place and sing "God save the Queen."  It was
+a time of enthusiastic loyalty; if you did not spring up quickly some
+patriotic old fool from the back would reach across and hit you over the
+head with the first thing he could lay his hands upon.
+
+Other music-hall performers caught at the idea.  By ending up with "God
+save the Queen" any performer, however poor, could retire in a whirlwind
+of applause.  Niggers, having bored us with tiresome songs about coons
+and honeys and Swanee Rivers, would, as a last resource, strike up "God
+save the Queen" on the banjo.  The whole house would have to rise and
+cheer.  Elderly Sisters Trippet, having failed to arouse our enthusiasm
+by allowing us a brief glimpse of an ankle, would put aside all
+frivolity, and tell us of a hero lover named George, who had fought
+somebody somewhere for his Queen and country.  "He fell!"--bang from the
+big drum and blue limelight.  In a recumbent position he appears to have
+immediately started singing "God save the Queen."
+
+
+
+How Anarchists are made.
+
+
+Sleepy members of the audience would be hastily awakened by their
+friends.  We would stagger to our feet.  The Sisters Trippet, with eyes
+fixed on the chandelier, would lead us: to the best of our ability we
+would sing "God save the Queen."
+
+There have been evenings when I have sung "God save the Queen" six times.
+Another season of it, and I should have become a Republican.
+
+The singer of patriotic songs is generally a stout and puffy man.  The
+perspiration pours from his face as the result of the violent
+gesticulations with which he tells us how he stormed the fort.  He must
+have reached it very hot.
+
+"There were ten to one agin us, boys."  We feel that this was a
+miscalculation on the enemy's part.  Ten to one "agin" such wildly
+gesticulating Britishers was inviting defeat.
+
+It seems to have been a terrible battle notwithstanding.  He shows us
+with a real sword how it was done.  Nothing could have lived within a
+dozen yards of that sword.  The conductor of the orchestra looks nervous.
+Our fear is lest he will end by cutting off his own head.  His
+recollections are carrying him away.  Then follows "Victory!"
+
+The gas men and the programme sellers cheer wildly.  We conclude with the
+inevitable "God save the King."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+The Ghost and the Blind Children.
+
+
+Ghosts are in the air.  It is difficult at this moment to avoid talking
+of ghosts.  The first question you are asked on being introduced this
+season is:
+
+"Do you believe in ghosts?"
+
+I would be so glad to believe in ghosts.  This world is much too small
+for me.  Up to a century or two ago the intellectual young man found it
+sufficient for his purposes.  It still contained the unknown--the
+possible--within its boundaries.  New continents were still to be
+discovered: we dreamt of giants, Liliputians, desert-fenced Utopias.  We
+set our sail, and Wonderland lay ever just beyond our horizon.  To-day
+the world is small, the light railway runs through the desert, the
+coasting steamer calls at the Islands of the Blessed, the last mystery
+has been unveiled, the fairies are dead, the talking birds are silent.
+Our baffled curiosity turns for relief outwards.  We call upon the dead
+to rescue us from our monotony.  The first authentic ghost will be
+welcomed as the saviour of humanity.
+
+But he must be a living ghost--a ghost we can respect, a ghost we can
+listen to.  The poor spiritless addle-headed ghost that has hitherto
+haunted our blue chambers is of no use to us.  I remember a thoughtful
+man once remarking during argument that if he believed in ghosts--the
+silly, childish spooks about which we had been telling anecdotes--death
+would possess for him an added fear: the idea that his next
+dwelling-place would be among such a pack of dismal idiots would sadden
+his departing hours.  What was he to talk to them about?  Apparently
+their only interest lay in recalling their earthly troubles.  The ghost
+of the lady unhappily married who had been poisoned, or had her throat
+cut, who every night for the last five hundred years had visited the
+chamber where it happened for no other purpose than to scream about it!
+what a tiresome person she would be to meet!  All her conversation during
+the long days would be around her earthly wrongs.  The other ghosts, in
+all probability, would have heard about that husband of hers, what he
+said, and what he did, till they were sick of the subject.  A newcomer
+would be seized upon with avidity.
+
+A lady of repute writes to a magazine that she once occupied for a season
+a wainscotted room in an old manor house.  On several occasions she awoke
+in the night: each time to witness the same ghostly performance.  Four
+gentlemen sat round a table playing cards.  Suddenly one of them sprang
+to his feet and plunged a dagger into the back of his partner.  The lady
+does not say so: one presumes it was his partner.  I have, myself, when
+playing bridge, seen an expression on my partner's face that said quite
+plainly:
+
+"I would like to murder you."
+
+I have not the memory for bridge.  I forget who it was that, last trick
+but seven, played the two of clubs.  I thought it was he, my partner.  I
+thought it meant that I was to take an early opportunity of forcing
+trumps.  I don't know why I thought so, I try to explain why I thought
+so.  It sounds a silly argument even to myself; I feel I have not got it
+quite right.  Added to which it was not my partner who played the two of
+clubs, it was Dummy.  If I had only remembered this, and had concluded
+from it--as I ought to have done--that my partner had the ace of
+diamonds--as otherwise why did he pass my knave?--we might have saved the
+odd trick.  I have not the head for bridge.  It is only an ordinary
+head--mine.  I have no business to play bridge.
+
+
+
+Why not, occasionally, a cheerful Ghost.
+
+
+But to return to our ghosts.  These four gentlemen must now and again,
+during their earthly existence, have sat down to a merry game of cards.
+There must have been evenings when nobody was stabbed.  Why choose an
+unpleasant occasion to harp exclusively upon it?  Why do ghosts never
+give a cheerful show?  The lady who was poisoned! there must have been
+other evenings in her life.  Why does she not show us "The first
+meeting": when he gave her the violets and said they were like her eyes?
+He wasn't always poisoning her.  There must have been a period before he
+ever thought of poisoning her.  Cannot these ghosts do something
+occasionally in what is termed "the lighter vein"?  If they haunt a
+forest glade, it is to perform a duel to the death, or an assassination.
+Why cannot they, for a change, give us an old-time picnic, or "The
+hawking party," which, in Elizabethan costume, should make a pretty
+picture?  Ghostland would appear to be obsessed by the spirit of the
+Scandinavian drama: murders, suicides, ruined fortunes, and broken hearts
+are the only material made use of.  Why is not a dead humorist allowed
+now and then to write the sketch?  There must be plenty of dead comic
+lovers; why are they never allowed to give a performance?
+
+
+
+Where are the dead Humorists?
+
+
+A cheerful person contemplates death with alarm.  What is he to do in
+this land of ghosts? there is no place for him.  Imagine the commonplace
+liver of a humdrum existence being received into ghostland.  He enters
+nervous, shy, feeling again the new boy at school.  The old ghosts gather
+round him.
+
+"How do you come here--murdered?"
+
+"No, at least, I don't think so."
+
+"Suicide?
+
+"No--can't remember the name of it now.  Began with a chill on the liver,
+I think."
+
+The ghosts are disappointed.  But a happy suggestion is made.  Perhaps he
+was the murderer; that would be even better.  Let him think carefully;
+can he recollect ever having committed a murder?  He racks his brains in
+vain, not a single murder comes to his recollection.  He never forged a
+will.  Doesn't even know where anything is hid.  Of what use will he be
+in ghostland?  One pictures him passing the centuries among a moody crowd
+of uninteresting mediocrities, brooding perpetually over their wasted
+lives.  Only the ghosts of ladies and gentlemen mixed up in crime have
+any "show" in ghostland.
+
+
+
+The Spirit does not shine as a Conversationalist.
+
+
+I feel an equal dissatisfaction with the spirits who are supposed to
+return to us and communicate with us through the medium of three-legged
+tables.  I do not deny the possibility that spirits exist.  I am even
+willing to allow them their three-legged tables.  It must be confessed it
+is a clumsy method.  One cannot help regretting that during all the ages
+they have not evolved a more dignified system.  One feels that the three-
+legged table must hamper them.  One can imagine an impatient spirit
+getting tired of spelling out a lengthy story on a three-legged table.
+But, as I have said, I am willing to assume that, for some spiritual
+reason unfathomable to my mere human intelligence, that three-legged
+table is essential.  I am willing also to accept the human medium.  She
+is generally an unprepossessing lady running somewhat to bulk.  If a
+gentleman, he so often has dirty finger-nails, and smells of stale beer.
+I think myself it would be so much simpler if the spirit would talk to me
+direct; we could get on quicker.  But there is that about the medium, I
+am told, which appeals to a spirit.  Well, it is his affair, not mine,
+and I waive the argument.  My real stumbling-block is the spirit
+himself--the sort of conversation that, when he does talk, he indulges
+in.  I cannot help feeling that his conversation is not worth the
+paraphernalia.  I can talk better than that myself.
+
+The late Professor Huxley, who took some trouble over this matter,
+attended some half-dozen _seances_, and then determined to attend no
+more.
+
+"I have," he said, "for my sins to submit occasionally to the society of
+live bores.  I refuse to go out of my way to spend an evening in the dark
+with dead bores."
+
+The spiritualists themselves admit that their table-rapping spooks are
+precious dull dogs; it would be difficult, in face of the communications
+recorded, for them to deny it.  They explain to us that they have not yet
+achieved communication with the higher spiritual Intelligences.  The more
+intelligent spirits--for some reason that the spiritualists themselves
+are unable to explain--do not want to talk to them, appear to have
+something else to do.  At present--so I am told, and can believe--it is
+only the spirits of lower intelligence that care to turn up on these
+evenings.  The spiritualists argue that, by continuing, the higher-class
+spirits will later on be induced to "come in."  I fail to follow the
+argument.  It seems to me that we are frightening them away.  Anyhow,
+myself I shall wait awhile.
+
+When the spirit comes along that can talk sense, that can tell me
+something I don't know, I shall be glad to meet him.  The class of spirit
+that we are getting just at present does not appeal to me.  The thought
+of him--the reflection that I shall die and spend the rest of eternity in
+his company--does not comfort me.
+
+
+
+She is now a Believer.
+
+
+A lady of my acquaintance tells me it is marvellous how much these
+spirits seem to know.  On her very first visit, the spirit, through the
+voice of the medium--an elderly gentleman residing obscurely in
+Clerkenwell--informed her without a moment's hesitation that she
+possessed a relative with the Christian name of George.  (I am not making
+this up--it is real.)  This gave her at first the idea that spiritualism
+was a fraud.  She had no relative named George--at least, so she thought.
+But a morning or two later her husband received a letter from Australia.
+"By Jove!" he exclaimed, as he glanced at the last page, "I had forgotten
+all about the poor old beggar."
+
+"Whom is it from?" she asked.
+
+"Oh, nobody you know--haven't seen him myself for twenty years--a third
+or fourth cousin of mine--George--"
+
+She never heard the surname, she was too excited.  The spirit had been
+right from the beginning; she _had_ a relative named George.  Her faith
+in spiritualism is now as a rock.
+
+There are thousands of folk who believe in Old Moore's Almanac.  My
+difficulty would be not to believe in the old gentleman.  I see that for
+the month of January last he foretold us that the Government would meet
+with determined and persistent opposition.  He warned us that there would
+be much sickness about, and that rheumatism would discover its old
+victims.  How does he know these things?  Is it that the stars really do
+communicate with him, or does he "feel it in his bones," as the saying is
+up North?
+
+During February, he mentioned, the weather would be unsettled.  He
+concluded:
+
+"The word Taxation will have a terrible significance for both Government
+and people this month."
+
+Really, it is quite uncanny.  In March:
+
+"Theatres will do badly during the month."
+
+There seems to be no keeping anything from Old Moore.  In April "much
+dissatisfaction will be expressed among Post Office employees."  That
+sounds probable, on the face of it.  In any event, I will answer for our
+local postman.
+
+In May "a wealthy magnate is going to die."  In June there is going to be
+a fire.  In July "Old Moore has reason to fear there will be trouble."
+
+I do hope he may be wrong, and yet somehow I feel a conviction that he
+won't be.  Anyhow, one is glad it has been put off till July.
+
+In August "one in high authority will be in danger of demise."  In
+September "zeal" on the part of persons mentioned "will outstrip
+discretion."  In October Old Moore is afraid again.  He cannot avoid a
+haunting suspicion that "Certain people will be victimized by extensive
+fraudulent proceedings."
+
+In November "the public Press will have its columns full of important
+news."  The weather will be "adverse," and "a death will occur in high
+circles."  This makes the second in one year.  I am glad I do not belong
+to the higher circles.
+
+
+
+How does he do it?
+
+
+In December Old Moore again foresees trouble, just when I was hoping it
+was all over.  "Frauds will come to light, and death will find its
+victims."
+
+And all this information is given to us for a penny.
+
+The palmist examines our hand.  "You will go a journey," he tells us.  It
+is marvellous!  How could he have known that only the night before we had
+been discussing the advisability of taking the children to Margate for
+the holidays?
+
+"There is trouble in store for you," he tells us, regretfully, "but you
+will get over it."  We feel that the future has no secret hidden from
+him.
+
+We have "presentiments" that people we love, who are climbing mountains,
+who are fond of ballooning, are in danger.
+
+The sister of a friend of mine who went out to the South African War as a
+volunteer had three presentiments of his death.  He came home safe and
+sound, but admitted that on three distinct occasions he had been in
+imminent danger.  It seemed to the dear lady a proof of everything she
+had ever read.
+
+Another friend of mine was waked in the middle of the night by his wife,
+who insisted that he should dress himself and walk three miles across a
+moor because she had had a dream that something terrible was happening to
+a bosom friend of hers.  The bosom friend and her husband were rather
+indignant at being waked at two o'clock in the morning, but their
+indignation was mild compared with that of the dreamer on learning that
+nothing was the matter.  From that day forward a coldness sprang up
+between the two families.
+
+I would give much to believe in ghosts.  The interest of life would be
+multiplied by its own square power could we communicate with the myriad
+dead watching us from their mountain summits.  Mr. Zangwill, in a poem
+that should live, draws for us a pathetic picture of blind children
+playing in a garden, laughing, romping.  All their lives they have lived
+in darkness; they are content.  But, the wonder of it, could their eyes
+by some miracle be opened!
+
+
+
+Blind Children playing in a World of Darkness.
+
+
+May not we be but blind children, suggests the poet, living in a world of
+darkness--laughing, weeping, loving, dying--knowing nothing of the wonder
+round us?
+
+The ghosts about us, with their god-like faces, it might be good to look
+at them.
+
+But these poor, pale-faced spooks, these dull-witted, table-thumping
+spirits: it would be sad to think that of such was the kingdom of the
+Dead.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Parents and their Teachers.
+
+
+My heart has been much torn of late, reading of the wrongs of Children.
+It has lately been discovered that Children are being hampered and
+harassed in their career by certain brutal and ignorant persons called,
+for want of a better name, parents.  The parent is a selfish wretch who,
+out of pure devilment, and without consulting the Child itself upon the
+subject, lures innocent Children into the world, apparently for the
+purpose merely of annoying them.  The parent does not understand the
+Child when he has got it; he does not understand anything, not much.  The
+only person who understands the Child is the young gentleman fresh from
+College and the elderly maiden lady, who, between them, produce most of
+the literature that explains to us the Child.
+
+The parent does not even know how to dress the Child.  The parent will
+persist in dressing the Child in a long and trailing garment that
+prevents the Child from kicking.  The young gentleman fresh from College
+grows almost poetical in his contempt.  It appears that the one thing
+essential for the health of a young child is that it should have perfect
+freedom to kick.  Later on the parent dresses the Child in short clothes,
+and leaves bits of its leg bare.  The elderly maiden Understander of
+Children, quoting medical opinion, denounces us as criminals for leaving
+any portion of that precious leg uncovered.  It appears that the
+partially uncovered leg of childhood is responsible for most of the
+disease that flesh is heir to.
+
+Then we put it into boots.  We "crush its delicately fashioned feet into
+hideous leather instruments of torture."  That is the sort of phrase that
+is hurled at us!  The picture conjured up is that of some fiend in human
+shape, calling itself a father, seizing some helpless cherub by the hair,
+and, while drowning its pathetic wails for mercy beneath roars of demon
+laughter, proceeding to bind about its tender bones some ancient
+curiosity dug from the dungeons of the Inquisition.
+
+If the young gentleman fresh from College or the maiden lady Understander
+could be, if only for a month or two, a father!  If only he or she could
+guess how gladly the father of limited income would reply,
+
+"My dear, you are wrong in saying that the children must have boots.  That
+is an exploded theory.  The children must not have boots.  I refuse to be
+a party to crushing their delicately fashioned feet into hideous leather
+instruments of torture.  The young gentleman fresh from College and the
+elderly maiden Understander have decided that the children must not have
+boots.  Do not let me hear again that out-of-date word--boots."
+
+If there were only one young gentleman fresh from College, one maiden
+lady Understander teaching us our duty, life would be simpler.  But there
+are so many young gentlemen from College, so many maiden lady
+Understanders, on the job--if I may be permitted a vulgarism; and as yet
+they are not all agreed.  It is distracting for the parent anxious to do
+right.  We put the little dears into sandals, and then at once other
+young gentlemen from College, other maiden lady Understanders, point to
+us as would-be murderers.  Long clothes are fatal, short clothes are
+deadly, boots are instruments of torture, to allow children to go about
+with bare feet shows that we regard them as Incumbrances, and, with low
+cunning, are seeking to be rid of them.
+
+
+
+Their first attempt.
+
+
+I knew a pair of parents.  I am convinced, in spite of all that can be
+said to the contrary, they were fond of their Child; it was their first.
+They were anxious to do the right thing.  They read with avidity all
+books and articles written on the subject of Children.  They read that a
+Child should always sleep lying on its back, and took it in turns to sit
+awake o' nights to make sure that the Child was always right side up.
+
+But another magazine told them that Children allowed to sleep lying on
+their backs grew up to be idiots.  They were sad they had not read of
+this before, and started the Child on its right side.  The Child, on the
+contrary, appeared to have a predilection for the left, the result being
+that neither the parents nor the baby itself for the next three weeks got
+any sleep worth speaking of.
+
+Later on, by good fortune, they came across a treatise that said a Child
+should always be allowed to choose its own position while sleeping, and
+their friends persuaded them to stop at that--told them they would never
+strike a better article if they searched the whole British Museum
+Library.  It troubled them to find that Child sometimes sleeping curled
+up with its toe in its mouth, and sometimes flat on its stomach with its
+head underneath the pillow.  But its health and temper were decidedly
+improved.
+
+
+
+The Parent can do no right.
+
+
+There is nothing the parent can do right.  You would think that now and
+then he might, if only by mere accident, blunder into sense.  But, no,
+there seems to be a law against it.  He brings home woolly rabbits and
+indiarubber elephants, and expects the Child to be contented "forsooth"
+with suchlike aids to its education.  As a matter of fact, the Child is
+content: it bangs its own head with the woolly rabbit and does itself no
+harm; it tries to swallow the indiarubber elephant; it does not succeed,
+but continues to hope.  With that woolly rabbit and that indiarubber
+elephant it would be as happy as the day is long if only the young
+gentleman from Cambridge would leave it alone, and not put new ideas into
+its head.  But the gentleman from Cambridge and the maiden lady
+Understander are convinced that the future of the race depends upon
+leaving the Child untrammelled to select its own amusements.  A friend of
+mine, during his wife's absence once on a visit to her mother, tried the
+experiment.
+
+The Child selected a frying-pan.  How it got the frying-pan remains to
+this day a mystery.  The cook said "frying-pans don't walk upstairs."  The
+nurse said she should be sorry to call anyone a liar, but that there was
+commonsense in everything.  The scullery-maid said that if everybody did
+their own work other people would not be driven beyond the limits of
+human endurance; and the housekeeper said that she was sick and tired of
+life.  My friend said it did not matter.  The Child clung to the frying-
+pan with passion.  The book my friend was reading said that was how the
+human mind was formed: the Child's instinct prompted it to seize upon
+objects tending to develop its brain faculty.  What the parent had got to
+do was to stand aside and watch events.
+
+The Child proceeded to black everything about the nursery with the bottom
+of the frying-pan.  It then set to work to lick the frying-pan clean.  The
+nurse, a woman of narrow ideas, had a presentiment that later on it would
+be ill.  My friend explained to her the error the world had hitherto
+committed: it had imagined that the parent knew a thing or two that the
+Child didn't.  In future the Children were to do their bringing up
+themselves.  In the house of the future the parents would be allotted the
+attics where they would be out of the way.  They might occasionally be
+allowed down to dinner, say, on Sundays.
+
+The Child, having exhausted all the nourishment the frying-pan contained,
+sought to develop its brain faculty by thumping itself over the head with
+the flat of the thing.  With the selfishness of the average
+parent--thinking chiefly of what the Coroner might say, and indifferent
+to the future of humanity, my friend insisted upon changing the game.
+
+
+
+His foolish talk.
+
+
+The parent does not even know how to talk to his own Child.  The Child is
+yearning to acquire a correct and dignified mode of expression.  The
+parent says: "Did ums.  Did naughty table hurt ickle tootsie pootsies?
+Baby say: ''Oo naughty table.  Me no love 'oo.'"
+
+The Child despairs of ever learning English.  What should we think
+ourselves were we to join a French class, and were the Instructor to
+commence talking to us French of this description?  What the Child,
+according to the gentleman from Cambridge, says to itself is,
+
+"Oh for one hour's intelligent conversation with a human being who can
+talk the language."
+
+Will not the young gentleman from Cambridge descend to detail?  Will he
+not give us a specimen dialogue?
+
+A celebrated lady writer, who has made herself the mouthpiece of feminine
+indignation against male stupidity, took up the cudgels a little while
+ago on behalf of Mrs. Caudle.  She admitted Mrs. Caudle appeared to be a
+somewhat foolish lady.  "_But what had Caudle ever done to improve Mrs.
+Caudle's mind_?"  Had he ever sought, with intelligent illuminating
+conversation, to direct her thoughts towards other topics than lent
+umbrellas and red-headed minxes?
+
+It is my complaint against so many of our teachers.  They scold us for
+what we do, but so rarely tell us what we ought to do.  Tell me how to
+talk to my baby, and I am willing to try.  It is not as if I took a
+personal pride in the phrase: "Did ums."  I did not even invent it.  I
+found it, so to speak, when I got here, and my experience is that it
+soothes the Child.  When he is howling, and I say "Did ums" with
+sympathetic intonation, he stops crying.  Possibly enough it is
+astonishment at the ineptitude of the remark that silences him.  Maybe it
+is that minor troubles are lost sight of face to face with the reflection
+that this is the sort of father with which fate has provided him.  But
+may not even this be useful to him?  He has got to meet with stupid
+people in the world.  Let him begin by contemplating me.  It will make
+things easier for him later on.  I put forward the idea in the hope of
+comforting the young gentleman from Cambridge.
+
+We injure the health of the Child by enforcing on it silence.  We have a
+stupid formula that children should be seen and not heard.  We deny it
+exercise to its lungs.  We discourage its natural and laudable curiosity
+by telling it not to worry us--not to ask so many questions.
+
+Won't somebody lend the young gentleman from Cambridge a small and
+healthy child just for a week or so, and let the bargain be that he lives
+with it all the time?  The young gentleman from Cambridge thinks, when we
+call up the stairs to say that if we hear another sound from the nursery
+during the next two hours we will come up and do things to that Child the
+mere thought of which should appal it, that is silencing the Child.  It
+does not occur to him that two minutes later that Child is yelling again
+at the top of its voice, having forgotten all we ever said.
+
+
+
+The Child of Fiction.
+
+
+I know the sort of Child the weeper over Children's wrongs has in his
+mind.  It has deep, soulful, yearning eyes.  It moves about the house
+softly, shedding an atmosphere of patient resignation.  It says: "Yes,
+dear papa."  "No, dear mamma."  It has but one ambition--to be good and
+useful.  It has beautiful thoughts about the stars.  You don't know
+whether it is in the house or isn't: you find it with its little face
+pressed close against the window-pane watching the golden sunset.  Nobody
+understands it.  It blesses the old people and dies.  One of these days
+the young gentleman from Cambridge will, one hopes, have a Baby of his
+own--a real Child: and serve him darn-well right.
+
+At present he is labouring under a wrong conception of the article.  He
+says we over-educate it.  We clog its wonderful brain with a mass of
+uninteresting facts and foolish formulas that we call knowledge.  He does
+not know that all this time the Child is alive and kicking.  He is under
+the delusion that the Child is taking all this lying down.  We tell the
+Child it has got to be quiet, or else we will wring its neck.  The
+gentleman from Cambridge pictures the Child as from that moment a silent
+spirit moving voiceless towards the grave.
+
+We catch the Child in the morning, and clean it up, and put a little
+satchel on its back, and pack it off to school; and the maiden lady
+Understander pictures that Child wasting the all too brief period of
+youth crowding itself up with knowledge.
+
+My dear Madam, you take it from me that your tears are being wasted.  You
+wipe your eyes and cheer up.  The dear Child is not going to be
+overworked: _he_ is seeing to that.
+
+As a matter of the fact, the Child of the present day is having, if
+anything, too good a time.  I shall be considered a brute for saying
+this, but I am thinking of its future, and my opinion is that we are
+giving it swelled head.  The argument just now in the air is that the
+parent exists merely for the Children.  The parent doesn't count.  It is
+as if a gardener were to say,
+
+"Bother the flowers, let them rot.  The sooner they are out of the way
+the better.  The seed is the only thing that interests me."
+
+You can't produce respectable seed but from carefully cultivated flowers.
+The philosopher, clamouring for improved Children, will later grasp the
+fact that the parent is of importance.  Then he will change his tactics,
+and address the Children, and we shall have our time.  He will impress on
+them how necessary it is for their own sakes that they should be careful
+of us.  We shall have books written about misunderstood fathers who were
+worried into early graves.
+
+
+
+The misunderstood Father.
+
+
+Fresh Air Funds will be started for sending parents away to the seaside
+on visits to kind bachelors living in detached houses, miles away from
+Children.  Books will be specially written for us picturing a world where
+school fees are never demanded and babies never howl o' nights.  Societies
+for the Prevention of Cruelty to Parents will arise.  Little girls who
+get their hair entangled and mislay all their clothes just before they
+are starting for the party--little boys who kick holes in their best
+shoes will be spanked at the public expense.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+Marriage and the Joke of it.
+
+
+Marriages are made in heaven--"but solely," it has been added by a
+cynical writer, "for export."  There is nothing more remarkable in human
+sociology than our attitude towards the institution of marriage.  So it
+came home to me the other evening as I sat on a cane chair in the ill-
+lighted schoolroom of a small country town.  The occasion was a Penny
+Reading.  We had listened to the usual overture from _Zampa_, played by
+the lady professor and the eldest daughter of the brewer; to "Phil
+Blood's Leap," recited by the curate; to the violin solo by the pretty
+widow about whom gossip is whispered--one hopes it is not true.  Then a
+pale-faced gentleman, with a drooping black moustache, walked on to the
+platform.  It was the local tenor.  He sang to us a song of love.
+Misunderstandings had arisen; bitter words, regretted as soon as uttered,
+had pierced the all too sensitive spirit.  Parting had followed.  The
+broken-hearted one had died believing his affection unrequited.  But the
+angels had since told him; he knew she loved him now--the accent on the
+now.
+
+I glanced around me.  We were the usual crowd of mixed humanity--tinkers,
+tailors, soldiers, sailors, with our cousins, and our sisters, and our
+wives.  So many of our eyes were wet with tears.  Miss Butcher could
+hardly repress her sobs.  Young Mr. Tinker, his face hidden behind his
+programme, pretended to be blowing his nose.  Mrs. Apothecary's large
+bosom heaved with heartfelt sighs.  The retired Colonel sniffed audibly.
+Sadness rested on our souls.  It might have been so different but for
+those foolish, hasty words!  There need have been no funeral.  Instead,
+the church might have been decked with bridal flowers.  How sweet she
+would have looked beneath her orange wreath!  How proudly, gladly, he
+might have responded "I will," take her for his wedded wife, to have and
+to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for
+poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death did
+them part.  And thereto he might have plighted his troth.
+
+In the silence which reigned after the applause had subsided the
+beautiful words of the Marriage Service seemed to be stealing through the
+room: that they might ever remain in perfect love and peace together.  Thy
+wife shall be as the fruitful vine.  Thy children like the olive branches
+round about thy table.  Lo! thus shall a man be blessed.  So shall men
+love their wives as their own bodies, and be not bitter against them,
+giving honour unto them as unto the weaker vessel.  Let the wife see that
+she reverence her husband, wearing the ornament of a meek and quiet
+spirit.
+
+
+
+Love and the Satyr.
+
+
+All the stories sung by the sweet singers of all time were echoing in our
+ears--stories of true love that would not run smoothly until the last
+chapter; of gallant lovers strong and brave against fate; of tender
+sweethearts, waiting, trusting, till love's golden crown was won; so they
+married and lived happy ever after.
+
+Then stepped briskly on the platform a stout, bald-headed man.  We
+greeted him with enthusiasm--it was the local low comedian.  The piano
+tinkled saucily.  The self-confident man winked and opened wide his
+mouth.  It was a funny song; how we roared with laughter!  The last line
+of each verse was the same:
+
+"And that's what it's like when you're married."
+
+"Before it was 'duckie,' and 'darling,' and 'dear.'  Now it's 'Take your
+cold feet away, Brute! can't you hear?'
+
+"Once they walked hand in hand: 'Me loves ickle 'oo.'  Now he strides on
+ahead" (imitation with aid of umbrella much appreciated; the bald-headed
+man, in his enthusiasm and owing to the smallness of the platform,
+sweeping the lady accompanist off her stool), "bawling: 'Come along,
+do.'"
+
+The bald-headed man interspersed side-splitting patter.  The husband
+comes home late; the wife is waiting for him at the top of the stairs
+with a broom.  He kisses the servant-girl.  She retaliates by discovering
+a cousin in the Guards.
+
+The comic man retired to an enthusiastic demand for an encore.  I looked
+around me at the laughing faces.  Miss Butcher had been compelled to
+stuff her handkerchief into her mouth.  Mr. Tinker was wiping his eyes;
+he was not ashamed this time, they were tears of merriment.  Mrs.
+Apothecary's motherly bosom was shaking like a jelly.  The Colonel was
+grinning from ear to ear.
+
+Later on, as I noticed in the programme, the schoolmistress, an unmarried
+lady, was down to sing "Darby and Joan."  She has a sympathetic voice.
+Her "Darby and Joan" is always popular.  The comic man would also again
+appear in the second part, and would oblige with (by request) "His Mother-
+in-Law."
+
+So the quaint comedy continues: To-night we will enjoy _Romeo and
+Juliet_, for to-morrow we have seats booked for _The Pink Domino_.
+
+
+
+What the Gipsy did not mention.
+
+
+"Won't the pretty lady let the poor old gipsy tell her fortune?"  Blushes,
+giggles, protestations.  Gallant gentleman friend insists.  A dark man is
+in love with pretty lady.  Gipsy sees a marriage not so very far ahead.
+Pretty lady says "What nonsense!" but looks serious.  Pretty lady's
+pretty friends must, of course, be teasing.  Gallant gentleman friend, by
+curious coincidence, happens to be dark.  Gipsy grins and passes on.
+
+Is that all the gipsy knows of pretty lady's future?  The rheumy, cunning
+eyes!  They were bonny and black many years ago, when the parchment skin
+was smooth and fair.  They have seen so many a passing show--do they see
+in pretty lady's hand nothing further?
+
+What would the wicked old eyes foresee did it pay them to speak:--Pretty
+lady crying tears into a pillow.  Pretty lady growing ugly, spite and
+anger spoiling pretty features.  Dark young man no longer loving.  Dark
+young man hurling bitter words at pretty lady--hurling, maybe, things
+more heavy.  Dark young man and pretty lady listening approvingly to
+comic singer, having both discovered: "That's what it's like when you're
+married."
+
+My friend H. G. Wells wrote a book, "The Island of Dr. Moreau."  I read
+it in MS. one winter evening in a lonely country house upon the hills,
+wind screaming to wind in the dark without.  The story has haunted me
+ever since.  I hear the wind's shrill laughter.  The doctor had taken the
+beasts of the forest, apes, tigers, strange creatures from the deep, had
+fashioned them with hideous cruelty into the shapes of men, had given
+them souls, had taught to them the law.  In all things else were they
+human, but their original instincts their creator's skill had failed to
+eliminate.  All their lives were one long torture.  The Law said, "We are
+men and women; this we shall do, this we shall not do."  But the ape and
+tiger still cried aloud within them.
+
+Civilization lays her laws upon us; they are the laws of gods--of the men
+that one day, perhaps, shall come.  But the primeval creature of the cave
+still cries within us.
+
+
+
+A few rules for Married Happiness.
+
+
+The wonder is that not being gods--being mere men and women--marriage
+works out as well as it does.  We take two creatures with the instincts
+of the ape still stirring within them; two creatures fashioned on the law
+of selfishness; two self-centred creatures of opposite appetites, of
+desires opposed to one another, of differing moods and fancies; two
+creatures not yet taught the lesson of self-control, of
+self-renunciation, and bind them together for life in an union so close
+that one cannot snore o'nights without disturbing the other's rest; that
+one cannot, without risk to happiness, have a single taste unshared by
+the other; that neither, without danger of upsetting the whole applecart,
+so to speak, can have an opinion with which the other does not heartedly
+agree.
+
+Could two angels exist together on such terms without ever quarrelling?  I
+doubt it.  To make marriage the ideal we love to picture it in romance,
+the elimination of human nature is the first essential.  Supreme
+unselfishness, perfect patience, changeless amiability, we should have to
+start with, and continue with, until the end.
+
+
+
+The real Darby and Joan.
+
+
+I do not believe in the "Darby and Joan" of the song.  They belong to
+song-land.  To accept them I need a piano, a sympathetic contralto voice,
+a firelight effect, and that sentimental mood in myself, the foundation
+of which is a good dinner well digested.  But there are Darbys and Joans
+of real flesh and blood to be met with--God bless them, and send more for
+our example--wholesome living men and women, brave, struggling, souls
+with common-sense.  Ah, yes! they have quarrelled; had their dark house
+of bitterness, of hate, when he wished to heaven he had never met her,
+and told her so.  How could he have guessed those sweet lips could utter
+such cruel words; those tender eyes, he loved to kiss, flash with scorn
+and anger?
+
+And she, had she known what lay behind; those days when he knelt before
+her, swore that his only dream was to save her from all pain.  Passion
+lies dead; it is a flame that burns out quickly.  The most beautiful face
+in the world grows indifferent to us when we have sat opposite it every
+morning at breakfast, every evening at supper, for a brief year or two.
+Passion is the seed.  Love grows from it, a tender sapling, beautiful to
+look upon, but wondrous frail, easily broken, easily trampled on during
+those first years of wedded life.  Only by much nursing, by long caring-
+for, watered with tears, shall it grow into a sturdy tree, defiant of the
+winds, 'neath which Darby and Joan shall sit sheltered in old age.
+
+They had commonsense, brave hearts.  Darby had expected too much.  Darby
+had not made allowance for human nature which he ought to have done,
+seeing how much he had of it himself.  Joan knows he did not mean it.
+Joan has a nasty temper; she admits it.  Joan will try, Darby will try.
+They kiss again with tears.  It is a workaday world; Darby and Joan will
+take it as it is, will do their best.  A little kindness, a little
+clasping of the hands before night comes.
+
+
+
+Many ways of Love.
+
+
+Youth deems it heresy, but I sometimes wonder if our English speaking way
+is quite the best.  I discussed the subject once with an old French lady.
+The English reader forms his idea of French life from the French novel;
+it leads to mistaken notions.  There are French Darbys, French Joans,
+many thousands of them.
+
+"Believe me," said my old French friend, "your English way is wrong; our
+way is not perfect, but it is the better, I am sure.  You leave it
+entirely to the young people.  What do they know of life, of themselves,
+even.  He falls in love with a pretty face.  She--he danced so well! he
+was so agreeable that day of the picnic!  If marriage were only for a
+month or so; could be ended without harm when the passion was burnt out.
+Ah, yes! then perhaps you would be right.  I loved at eighteen,
+madly--nearly broke my heart.  I meet him occasionally now.  My dear"--her
+hair was silvery white, and I was only thirty-five; she always called me
+"my dear"; it is pleasant at thirty-five to be talked to as a child.  "He
+was a perfect brute, handsome he had been, yes, but all that was changed.
+He was as stupid as an ox.  I never see his poor frightened-looking wife
+without shuddering thinking of what I have escaped.  They told me all
+that, but I looked only at his face, and did not believe them.  They
+forced me into marriage with the kindest man that ever lived.  I did not
+love him then, but I loved him for thirty years; was it not better?"
+
+"But, my dear friend," I answered; "that poor, frightened-looking wife of
+your first love!  Her marriage also was, I take it, the result of
+parental choosing.  The love marriage, I admit, as often as not turns out
+sadly.  The children choose ill.  Parents also choose ill.  I fear there
+is no sure receipt for the happy marriage."
+
+"You are arguing from bad examples," answered my silver-haired friend;
+"it is the system that I am defending.  A young girl is no judge of
+character.  She is easily deceived, is wishful to be deceived.  As I have
+said, she does not even know herself.  She imagines the mood of the
+moment will remain with her.  Only those who have watched over her with
+loving insight from her infancy know her real temperament.
+
+"The young man is blinded by his passion.  Nature knows nothing of
+marriage, of companionship.  She has only one aim.  That accomplished,
+she is indifferent to the future of those she has joined together.  I
+would have parents think only of their children's happiness, giving to
+worldly considerations their true value, but nothing beyond, choosing for
+their children with loving care, with sense of their great
+responsibility."
+
+
+
+Which is it?
+
+
+"I fear our young people would not be contented with our choosing," I
+suggested.
+
+"Are they so contented with their own, the honeymoon over?" she responded
+with a smile.
+
+We agreed it was a difficult problem viewed from any point.
+
+But I still think it would be better were we to heap less ridicule upon
+the institution.  Matrimony cannot be "holy" and ridiculous at the same
+time.  We have been familiar with it long enough to make up our minds in
+which light to regard it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Man and his Tailor.
+
+
+What's wrong with the "Made-up Tie"?  I gather from the fashionable
+novelist that no man can wear a made-up tie and be a gentleman.  He may
+be a worthy man, clever, well-to-do, eligible from every other point of
+view; but She, the refined heroine, can never get over the fact that he
+wears a made-up tie.  It causes a shudder down her high-bred spine
+whenever she thinks of it.  There is nothing else to be said against him.
+There is nothing worse about him than this--he wears a made-up tie.  It
+is all sufficient.  No true woman could ever care for him, no really
+classy society ever open its doors to him.
+
+I am worried about this thing because, to confess the horrid truth, I
+wear a made-up tie myself.  On foggy afternoons I steal out of the house
+disguised.  They ask me where I am going in a hat that comes down over my
+ears, and why I am wearing blue spectacles and a false beard, but I will
+not tell them.  I creep along the wall till I find a common hosier's
+shop, and then, in an assumed voice, I tell the man what it is I want.
+They come to fourpence halfpenny each; by taking the half-dozen I get
+them for a trifle less.  They are put on in a moment, and, to my vulgar
+eye, look neat and tasteful.
+
+Of course, I know I am not a gentleman.  I have given up hopes of ever
+being one.  Years ago, when life presented possibilities, I thought that
+with pains and intelligence I might become one.  I never succeeded.  It
+all depends on being able to tie a bow.  Round the bed-post, or the neck
+of the water-jug, I could tie the wretched thing to perfection.  If only
+the bed-post or the water-jug could have taken my place and gone to the
+party instead of me, life would have been simpler.  The bed-post and the
+water-jug, in its neat white bow, looked like a gentleman--the
+fashionable novelist's idea of a gentleman.  Upon myself the result was
+otherwise, suggesting always a feeble attempt at suicide by
+strangulation.  I could never understand how it was done.  There were
+moments when it flashed across me that the secret lay in being able to
+turn one's self inside out, coming up with one's arms and legs the other
+way round.  Standing on one's head might have surmounted the difficulty;
+but the higher gymnastics Nature has denied to me.  "The Boneless Wonder"
+or the "Man Serpent" could, I felt, be a gentleman so easily.  To one to
+whom has been given only the common ordinary joints gentlemanliness is
+apparently an impossible ideal.
+
+It is not only the tie.  I never read the fashionable novel without
+misgiving.  Some hopeless bounder is being described:
+
+"If you want to know what he is like," says the Peer of the Realm,
+throwing himself back in his deep easy-chair, and puffing lazily at his
+cigar of delicate aroma, "he is the sort of man that wears three studs in
+his shirt."
+
+
+
+The difficulty of being a Gentleman.
+
+
+Merciful heavens!  I myself wear three studs in my shirt.  I also am a
+hopeless bounder, and I never knew it.  It comes upon me like a
+thunderbolt.  I thought three studs were fashionable.  The idiot at the
+shop told me three studs were all the rage, and I ordered two dozen.  I
+can't afford to throw them away.  Till these two dozen shirts are worn
+out, I shall have to remain a hopeless bounder.
+
+Why have we not a Minister of the Fine Arts?  Why does not a paternal
+Government fix notices at the street corners, telling the would-be
+gentleman how many studs he ought to wear, what style of necktie now
+distinguishes the noble-minded man from the base-hearted?  They are
+prompt enough with their police regulations, their vaccination orders--the
+higher things of life they neglect.
+
+I select at random another masterpiece of English literature.
+
+"My dear," says Lady Montresor, with her light aristocratic laugh, "you
+surely cannot seriously think of marrying a man who wears socks with
+yellow spots?"
+
+Lady Emmelina sighs.
+
+"He is very nice," she murmurs, "but I suppose you are right.  I suppose
+that sort of man does get on your nerves after a time."
+
+"My dear child," says Lady Montresor, "he is impossible."
+
+In a cold sweat I rush upstairs into my bedroom.
+
+I thought so: I am always wrong.  All my best socks have yellow spots.  I
+rather fancied them.  They were expensive, too, now I come to think of
+it.
+
+What am I to do?  If I sacrifice them and get red spots, then red spots,
+for all I know, may be wrong.  I have no instinct.  The fashionable
+novelist never helps one.  He tells us what is wrong, but he does not
+tell us what is right.  It is creative criticism that I feel the need of.
+Why does not the Lady Montresor go on?  Tell me what sort of socks the
+ideal lover ought to wear.  There are so many varieties of socks.  What
+is a would-be-gentleman to do?  Would it be of any use writing to the
+fashionable novelist:--
+
+
+
+How we might, all of us, be Gentlemen.
+
+
+"Dear Mr. Fashionable Novelist (or should it be Miss?),--Before going to
+my tailor, I venture to write to you on a subject of some importance.  I
+am fairly well educated, of good family and address, and, so my friends
+tell me, of passable appearance.  I yearn to become a gentleman.  If it
+is not troubling you too much, would you mind telling me how to set about
+the business?  What socks and ties ought I to wear?  Do I wear a flower
+in my button-hole, or is that a sign of a coarse mind?  How many buttons
+on a morning coat show a beautiful nature?  Does a stand-up collar with a
+tennis shirt prove that you are of noble descent, or, on the contrary,
+stamp you as a _parvenu_?  If answering these questions imposes too great
+a tax on your time, perhaps you would not mind telling me how you
+yourself know these things.  Who is your authority, and when is he at
+home?  I should apologize for writing to you but that I feel you will
+sympathize with my appeal.  It seems a pity there should be so many
+vulgar, ill-bred people in the world when a little knowledge on these
+trivial points would enable us all to become gentlemen.  Thanking you in
+anticipation, I remain . . . "
+
+Would he or she tell us?  Or would the fashionable novelist reply as I
+once overheard a harassed mother retort upon one of her inquiring
+children.  Most of the afternoon she had been rushing out into the
+garden, where games were in progress, to tell the children what they must
+not do:--"Tommy, you know you must not do that.  Haven't you got any
+sense at all?"  "Johnny, you wicked boy, how dare you do that; how many
+more times do you want me to tell you?"  "Jane, if you do that again you
+will go straight to bed, my girl!" and so on.
+
+At length the door was opened from without, and a little face peeped in:
+"Mother!"
+
+"Now, what is it? can't I ever get a moment's peace?"
+
+"Mother, please would you mind telling us something we might do?"
+
+The lady almost fell back on the floor in her astonishment.  The idea had
+never occurred to her.
+
+"What may you do!  Don't ask me.  I am tired enough of telling you what
+not to do."
+
+
+
+Things a Gentleman should never do.
+
+
+I remember when a young man, wishful to conform to the rules of good
+society, I bought a book of etiquette for gentlemen.  Its fault was just
+this.  It told me through many pages what not to do.  Beyond that it
+seemed to have no idea.  I made a list of things it said a gentleman
+should _never_ do: it was a lengthy list.
+
+Determined to do the job completely while I was about it, I bought other
+books of etiquette and added on their list of "Nevers."  What one book
+left out another supplied.  There did not seem much left for a gentleman
+to do.
+
+I concluded by the time I had come to the end of my books, that to be a
+true gentleman my safest course would be to stop in bed for the rest of
+my life.  By this means only could I hope to avoid every possible _faux
+pas_, every solecism.  I should have lived and died a gentleman.  I could
+have had it engraved upon my tombstone:
+
+"He never in his life committed a single act unbecoming to a gentleman."
+
+To be a gentleman is not so easy, perhaps, as a fashionable novelist
+imagines.  One is forced to the conclusion that it is not a question
+entirely for the outfitter.  My attention was attracted once by a notice
+in the window of a West-End emporium, "Gentlemen supplied."
+
+It is to such like Universal Providers that the fashionable novelist goes
+for his gentleman.  The gentleman is supplied to him complete in every
+detail.  If the reader be not satisfied, that is the reader's fault.  He
+is one of those tiresome, discontented customers who does not know a good
+article when he has got it.
+
+I was told the other day of the writer of a musical farce (or is it
+comedy?) who was most desirous that his leading character should be a
+perfect gentleman.  During the dress rehearsal, the actor representing
+the part had to open his cigarette case and request another perfect
+gentleman to help himself.  The actor drew forth his case.  It caught the
+critical eye of the author.
+
+"Good heavens!" he cried, "what do you call that?"
+
+"A cigarette case," answered the actor.
+
+"But, my dear boy," exclaimed the author, "surely it is silver?"
+
+"I know," admitted the actor, "it does perhaps suggest that I am living
+beyond my means, but the truth is I picked it up cheap."
+
+The author turned to the manager.
+
+"This won't do," he explained, "a real gentleman always carries a gold
+cigarette case.  He must be a gentleman, or there's no point in the
+plot."
+
+"Don't let us endanger any point the plot may happen to possess, for
+goodness sake," agreed the manager, "let him by all means have a gold
+cigarette case."
+
+
+
+How one may know the perfect Gentleman.
+
+
+So, regardless of expense, a gold cigarette case was obtained and put
+down to expenses.  And yet on the first night of that musical play, when
+that leading personage smashed a tray over a waiter's head, and, after a
+row with the police, came home drunk to his wife, even that gold
+cigarette case failed to convince one that the man was a gentleman beyond
+all doubt.
+
+The old writers appear to have been singularly unaware of the importance
+attaching to these socks, and ties, and cigarette-cases.  They told us
+merely what the man felt and thought.  What reliance can we place upon
+them?  How could they possibly have known what sort of man he was
+underneath his clothes?  Tweed or broadcloth is not transparent.  Even
+could they have got rid of his clothes there would have remained his
+flesh and bones.  It was pure guess-work.  They did not observe.
+
+The modern writer goes to work scientifically.  He tells us that the
+creature wore a made-up tie.  From that we know he was not a gentleman;
+it follows as the night the day.  The fashionable novelist notices the
+young man's socks.  It reveals to us whether the marriage would have been
+successful or a failure.  It is necessary to convince us that the hero is
+a perfect gentleman: the author gives him a gold cigarette case.
+
+A well-known dramatist has left it on record that comedy cannot exist
+nowadays, for the simple reason that gentlemen have given up taking snuff
+and wearing swords.  How can one have comedy in company with
+frock-coats--without its "Las" and its "Odds Bobs."
+
+The sword may have been helpful.  I have been told that at _levees_ City
+men, unaccustomed to the thing, have, with its help, provided comedy for
+the rest of the company.
+
+But I take it this is not the comedy our dramatist had in mind.
+
+
+
+Why not an Exhibition of Gentlemen?
+
+
+It seems a pity that comedy should disappear from among us.  If it depend
+entirely on swords and snuff-boxes, would it not be worth the while of
+the Society of Authors to keep a few gentlemen specially trained?  Maybe
+some sympathetic theatrical manager would lend us costumes of the
+eighteenth century.  We might provide them with swords and snuff-boxes.
+They might meet, say, once a week, in a Queen Anne drawing-room,
+especially prepared by Gillow, and go through their tricks.  Authors
+seeking high-class comedy might be admitted to a gallery.
+
+Perhaps this explains why old-fashioned readers complain that we do not
+give them human nature.  How can we?  Ladies and gentlemen nowadays don't
+wear the proper clothes.  Evidently it all depends upon the clothes.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+Woman and her behaviour.
+
+
+Should women smoke?
+
+The question, in four-inch letters, exhibited on a placard outside a
+small newsvendor's shop, caught recently my eye.  The wanderer through
+London streets is familiar with such-like appeals to his decision:
+"Should short men marry tall wives?"  "Ought we to cut our hair?"  "Should
+second cousins kiss?"  Life's problems appear to be endless.
+
+Personally, I am not worrying myself whether women should smoke or not.
+It seems to me a question for the individual woman to decide for herself.
+I like women who smoke; I can see no objection to their smoking.  Smoking
+soothes the nerves.  Women's nerves occasionally want soothing.  The
+tiresome idiot who argues that smoking is unwomanly denounces the
+drinking of tea as unmanly.  He is a wooden-headed person who derives all
+his ideas from cheap fiction.  The manly man of cheap fiction smokes a
+pipe and drinks whisky.  That is how we know he is a man.  The womanly
+woman--well, I always feel I could make a better woman myself out of an
+old clothes shop and a hair-dresser's block.
+
+But, as I have said, the question does not impress me as one demanding my
+particular attention.  I also like the woman who does not smoke.  I have
+met in my time some very charming women who do not smoke.  It may be a
+sign of degeneracy, but I am prepared to abdicate my position of woman's
+god, leaving her free to lead her own life.
+
+
+
+Woman's God.
+
+
+Candidly, the responsibility of feeling myself answerable for all a woman
+does or does not do would weigh upon me.  There are men who are willing
+to take this burden upon themselves, and a large number of women are
+still anxious that they should continue to bear it.  I spoke quite
+seriously to a young lady not long ago on the subject of tight lacing;
+undoubtedly she was injuring her health.  She admitted it herself.
+
+"I know all you can say," she wailed; "I daresay a lot of it is true.
+Those awful pictures where one sees--well, all the things one does not
+want to think about.  If they are correct, it must be bad, squeezing it
+all up together."
+
+"Then why continue to do so?" I argued.
+
+"Oh, it's easy enough to talk," she explained; "a few old fogies like
+you"--I had been speaking very plainly to her, and she was cross with
+me--"may pretend you don't like small waists, but _the average man
+does_."
+
+Poor girl!  She was quite prepared to injure herself for life, to damage
+her children's future, to be uncomfortable for fifteen hours a day, all
+to oblige the average man.
+
+It is a compliment to our sex.  What man would suffer injury and torture
+to please the average woman?  This frenzied desire of woman to conform to
+our ideals is touching.  A few daring spirits of late years have
+exhibited a tendency to seek for other gods--for ideals of their own.  We
+call them the unsexed women.  The womanly women lift up their hands in
+horror of such blasphemy.
+
+When I was a boy no womanly woman rode a bicycle--tricycles were
+permitted.  On three wheels you could still be womanly, but on two you
+were "a creature"!  The womanly woman, seeing her approach, would draw
+down the parlour blind with a jerk, lest the children looking out might
+catch a glimpse of her, and their young souls be smirched for all
+eternity.
+
+No womanly woman rode inside a hansom or outside a 'bus.  I remember the
+day my own dear mother climbed outside a 'bus for the first time in her
+life.  She was excited, and cried a little; but nobody--heaven be
+praised!--saw us--that is, nobody of importance.  And afterwards she
+confessed the air was pleasant.
+
+"Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the
+old aside," is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good
+opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, "the
+average person," but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary.  That is, if
+the world is to move forward.
+
+The freedom-loving girl of to-day, who can enjoy a walk by herself
+without losing her reputation, who can ride down the street on her "bike"
+without being hooted at, who can play a mixed double at tennis without
+being compelled by public opinion to marry her partner, who can, in
+short, lead a human creature's life, and not that of a lap-dog led about
+at the end of a string, might pause to think what she owes to the
+"unsexed creatures" who fought her battle for her fifty years ago.
+
+
+
+Those unsexed Creatures.
+
+
+Can the working woman of to-day, who may earn her own living, if she
+will, without loss of the elementary rights of womanhood, think of the
+bachelor girl of a short generation ago without admiration of her pluck?
+There were ladies in those day too "unwomanly" to remain helpless burdens
+on overworked fathers and mothers, too "unsexed" to marry the first man
+that came along for the sake of their bread and butter.  They fought
+their way into journalism, into the office, into the shop.  The reformer
+is not always the pleasantest man to invite to a tea-party.  Maybe these
+women who went forward with the flag were not the most charming of their
+sex.  The "Dora Copperfield" type will for some time remain the young
+man's ideal, the model the young girl puts before herself.  Myself, I
+think Dora Copperfield charming, but a world of Dora Copperfields!
+
+The working woman is a new development in sociology.  She has many
+lessons to learn, but one has hopes of her.  It is said that she is
+unfitting herself to be a wife and mother.  If the ideal helpmeet for a
+man be an animated Dresden china shepherdess--something that looks pretty
+on the table, something to be shown round to one's friends, something
+that can be locked up safely in a cupboard, that asks no questions, and,
+therefore, need be told no lies--then a woman who has learnt something of
+the world, who has formed ideas of her own, will not be the ideal wife.
+
+
+
+References given--and required.
+
+
+Maybe the average man will not be her ideal husband.  Each Michaelmas at
+a little town in the Thames Valley with which I am acquainted there is
+held a hiring fair.  A farmer one year laid his hand on a lively-looking
+lad, and asked him if he wanted a job.  It was what the boy was looking
+for.
+
+"Got a character?" asked the farmer.  The boy replied that he had for the
+last two years been working for Mr. Muggs, the ironmonger--felt sure that
+Mr. Muggs would give him a good character.
+
+"Well, go and ask Mr. Muggs to come across and speak to me, I will wait
+here," directed the would-be employer.  Five minutes went by--ten
+minutes.  No Mr. Muggs appeared.  Later in the afternoon the farmer met
+the boy again.
+
+"Mr. Muggs never came near me with that character of yours," said the
+farmer.
+
+"No, sir," answered the boy, "I didn't ask him to."
+
+"Why not?" inquired the farmer.
+
+"Well, I told him who it was that wanted it"--the boy hesitated.
+
+"Well?" demanded the farmer, impatiently.
+
+"Well, then, he told me yours," explained the boy.
+
+Maybe the working woman, looking for a husband, and not merely a
+livelihood, may end by formulating standards of her own.  She may end by
+demanding the manly man and moving about the world, knowing something of
+life, may arrive at the conclusion that something more is needed than the
+smoking of pipes and the drinking of whiskies and sodas.  We must be
+prepared for this.  The sheltered woman who learnt her life from fairy
+stories is a dream of the past.  Woman has escaped from her "shelter"--she
+is on the loose.  For the future we men have got to accept the
+emancipated woman as an accomplished fact.
+
+
+
+The ideal World.
+
+
+Many of us are worried about her.  What is going to become of the home?  I
+admit there is a more ideal existence where the working woman would find
+no place; it is in a world that exists only on the comic opera stage.
+There every picturesque village contains an equal number of ladies and
+gentlemen nearly all the same height and weight, to all appearance of the
+same age.  Each Jack has his Jill, and does not want anybody else's.
+There are no complications: one presumes they draw lots and fall in love
+the moment they unscrew the paper.  They dance for awhile on grass which
+is never damp, and then into the conveniently situated ivy-covered church
+they troop in pairs and are wedded off hand by a white-haired clergyman,
+who is a married man himself.
+
+Ah, if the world were but a comic opera stage, there would be no need for
+working women!  As a matter of fact, so far as one can judge from the
+front of the house, there are no working men either.
+
+But outside the opera house in the muddy street Jack goes home to his
+third floor back, or his chambers in the Albany, according to his caste,
+and wonders when the time will come when he will be able to support a
+wife.  And Jill climbs on a penny 'bus, or steps into the family
+brougham, and dreams with regret of a lost garden, where there was just
+one man and just one woman, and clothes grew on a fig tree.
+
+With the progress of civilization--utterly opposed as it is to all
+Nature's intentions--the number of working women will increase.  With
+some friends the other day I was discussing motor-cars, and one gentleman
+with sorrow in his voice--he is the type of Conservative who would have
+regretted the passing away of the glacial period--opined that motor-cars
+had come to stay.
+
+"You mean," said another, "they have come to go."  The working woman,
+however much we may regret it, has come to go, and she is going it.  We
+shall have to accept her and see what can be done with her.  One thing is
+certain, we shall not solve the problem of the twentieth century by
+regretting the simple sociology of the Stone Age.
+
+
+
+A Lover's View.
+
+
+Speaking as a lover, I welcome the openings that are being given to women
+to earn their own livelihood.  I can conceive of no more degrading
+profession for a woman--no profession more calculated to unfit her for
+being that wife and mother we talk so much about than the profession that
+up to a few years ago was the only one open to her--the profession of
+husband-hunting.
+
+As a man, I object to being regarded as woman's last refuge, her one and
+only alternative to the workhouse.  I cannot myself see why the woman who
+has faced the difficulties of existence, learnt the lesson of life,
+should not make as good a wife and mother as the ignorant girl taken
+direct, one might almost say, from the nursery, and, without the
+slightest preparation, put in a position of responsibility that to a
+thinking person must be almost appalling.
+
+It has been said that the difference between men and women is this: That
+the man goes about the world making it ready for the children, that the
+woman stops at home making the children ready for the world.  Will not
+she do it much better for knowing something of the world, for knowing
+something of the temptations, the difficulties, her own children will
+have to face, for having learnt by her own experience to sympathize with
+the struggles, the sordid heart-breaking cares that man has daily to
+contend with?
+
+Civilization is ever undergoing transformation, but human nature remains.
+The bachelor girl, in her bed-sitting room, in her studio, in her flat,
+will still see in the shadows the vision of the home, will still hear in
+the silence the sound of children's voices, will still dream of the
+lover's kiss that is to open up new life to her.  She is not quite so
+unsexed as you may think, my dear womanly madame.  A male friend of mine
+was telling me of a catastrophe that once occurred at a station in the
+East Indies.
+
+
+
+No time to think of Husbands.
+
+
+A fire broke out at night, and everybody was in terror lest it should
+reach the magazine.  The women and children were being hurried to the
+ships, and two ladies were hastening past my friend.  One of them paused,
+and, clasping her hands, demanded of him if he knew what had become of
+her husband.  Her companion was indignant.
+
+"For goodness' sake, don't dawdle, Maria," she cried; "this is no time to
+think of husbands."
+
+There is no reason to fear that the working woman will ever cease to
+think of husbands.  Maybe, as I have said, she will demand a better
+article than the mere husband-hunter has been able to stand out for.
+Maybe she herself will have something more to give; maybe she will bring
+to him broader sympathies, higher ideals.  The woman who has herself been
+down among the people, who has faced life in the open, will know that the
+home is but one cell of the vast hive.
+
+We shall, perhaps, hear less of the woman who "has her own home and
+children to think of--really takes no interest in these matters"--these
+matters of right and wrong, these matters that spell the happiness or
+misery of millions.
+
+
+
+The Wife of the Future.
+
+
+Maybe the bridegroom of the future will not say, "I have married a wife,
+and therefore I cannot come," but "I have married a wife; we will both
+come."
+
+
+
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