o and from Juliet's balcony, made at such desperate risk to
both lovers, had the telephone only been in existence, could have
been made in complete security from the seclusion of their distant
apartments.

Seriously speaking, there are few love tragedies, few serious historic
crises of any kind, that might not have been averted by the telephone.
Strange indeed, when one considers a little, is that fallacy of
sentimentalism which calls science the enemy of love.

Far from being its enemy, science is easily seen to be its most romantic
servant; for all its strenuous and delicate learning it brings to the
feet of love for a plaything. Not only will it carry the voice of love
across space and time, but it will even bring it back to you from
eternity. It will not only carry to your ears the voices of the living,
but it will also keep safe for you the sweeter voices of the dead. In
fact, it would almost seem as though science had made all its
discoveries for the sake of love.

XX

TWO WONDERFUL OLD LADIES

It is a pity that our language has no other word to indicate that one
has lived seventy, eighty, or ninety years, than the word "old"; for the
word "old" carries with it implications of "senility" and decrepitude,
which many merely chronologically "old" people very properly resent. The
word "young," similarly, needs the assistance of another word, for we
all know individuals of thirty and forty, sometimes even only twenty,
whom it is as absurd to call "young" as it is to call those others of
seventy, eighty, or ninety, "old."

"Youth" is too large and rich a word to serve the limited purpose of
numbering the years of undeveloped boys and girls. It should stand
rather for the vital principle in men and women, ever expanding, and
rebuilding, and refreshing the human organism, partly a physical, but
perhaps in a greater degree a spiritual energy.

I am not writing this out of any compliment to two wonderful "old"
ladies of whom I am particularly thinking. They would consider me a
dunce were they to suspect me of any such commonplace intent. No! I am
not going to call them "eighty years young," or employ any of those
banal euphemisms with which would-be "tactful" but really club-footed
sentimentalists insult the intelligence of the so-called "old." Of
course, I know that they are both eighty or thereabouts, and they know
very well that I know. We make no secret of it. Why should we? Actually
though the number o