ont of a man's suit is
ruined. She sits down and fairly weeps, appalled at herself. Last
evening she was punishing males; this morning she turns eggs into
missiles, she a loving, an ambitious, an intensely respectable young
wife! As for him, he sits motionless, silent, decorated with the colors
of eggs, a graduate of a famous university. Calamity has brought him
also to his senses. Still weeping, she puts on her hat and jacket.
"Where are you going?" he asks, solemnly, no longer homicidal, no longer
hungry. "I must hurry to the cleaners for your other suit!" says she,
tragic. And she hurries....

A shocking story, a sordid story, you say. Not a bit! They are young;
they have the incomparable virtue of youthfulness. It is naught, all
that! The point of the story is that it illustrates New York--a New York
more authentic than the spaciousness of upper Fifth Avenue or the
unnatural dailiness of grand hotels. I like it.

* * * * *

You may see that couple later in a suburban house--a real home for the
time being, with a colorable imitation of a garden all about it, and the
"finest suburban railway service in the world": the whole being a frame
and environment for the rearing of children. I have sat at dinner in
such houses, and the talk was of nothing but children; and anybody who
possessed any children, or any reliable knowledge of the ways of
children, was sure of a respectable hearing and warm interest. If one
said, "By the way, I think I may have a photograph of the kid in my
pocket," every eye would reply immediately: "Out with it, man--or
woman!--and don't pretend you don't always carry the photograph with you
on purpose to show it off!" In such a house it is proved that children
are unmatched as an exhaustless subject of conversation. And the
conversation is rendered more thrilling by the sense of partially tamed
children-children fully aware of their supremacy--prowling to and fro
unseen in muddy boots and torn pinafores, and speculating in their
realistic way upon the mysteriousness of adults.

"We are keen on children here," says the youngish father, frankly. He is
altered now from the man he was when he inhabited a diminutive flat in
the full swirl of New York. His face is calmer, milder, more benevolent,
and more resignedly worried. And assuredly no one would recognize in him
the youth who howled murderously at university football matches and
cried with monstrous ferocity at si