and most people
would sooner expire than not be able to flaunt these wrappings, or the
rags or them, before somebody's eyes. And this spirit exists in
individuals in almost every grade of society; until you get to the rock
bottom of existence, when the immediate problems of life are so menacing
that men and women dare not play about with the gilded imitations. This
"Kaiser-spirit"--or the spirit which, if it can't inspire homage, will
buy the "props" of it and sit among the hired gorgeousness in the full
belief that their own individual greatness has deserved it--is
everywhere. Very few men and women are content to be simply men and
women. They all seek strenuously to be mistaken for Great Panjandrums.
The woman who takes a little air in the park in the afternoon with two
full-grown men sitting up, straight-backed and impassive, on the box of
the carriage, is one example of this. The chatelaine of a jerry-built
villa, who is pleased to consort with anybody except servants and the
class below servants, is another. The majority of people need money, not
in order to live and be happy, but in order to impress the crowd that
they are of more value than those who are thereby impressed. The drama
which goes on around and around the problem of whom to "call upon" and
whom to "cut," fills the lives of more men and women than the problem of
how to make the best of life and pave one's way to the hereafter. If
Christ came back to earth, He would have to choose one set or
another--Belgravia, Bayswater, or Brixton.

_Love "Mush"_

I was standing outside a music shop the other day, gazing through the
windows at the songs "everybody is singing." Their titles amused me.
Not a single one promised very much real sense. They were all what I
will call love "mush"--"If you were a flowering rose," and "Come to my
garden of love," were two typical examples. The remainder of the
verses--with which the suburban sopranos will doubtless break the
serenity of the suburban nights this summer--were of a "sloppy"
sentimentality combined with a kind of hypersexual idiocy unparalleled
except in an English ballad of the popular order. On such belief, I said
to myself, are young lovers brought up. Well, I suppose it would be
difficult for a youthful soprano to put "her soul" into a song which
asked, "What shall I give my dear one every morning for his breakfast?"
or, "Who'll soothe your brow when the Income Tax is due, dear?" And yet