h when in the evening his wife appears dressed in a
Russian ballet frock or even a little less. He is growing used to
education, and he fears it less than he did. In fact, he is beginning to
appreciate it.

His wife is more suspicious, for she belongs to a generation of women
that was ignorant and reveled in its ignorance and called it charm, a
generation when all women were fools except the spitfires and the wits.
She tends to think that she was "finished" as a lady; her daughters
consider that she was done for. The grandmother is a little jealous, but
the mother of to-day, the formed woman of about thirty-five, has made a
great leap and resembles her children much more than she does her
mother. Her offspring do not say: "What is home without a mother? Peace,
perfect peace." She is a little too conscientious, perhaps; she has
turned her back rather rudely upon her mother's pursuits, such as tea
and scandal, and has taken too virulently to lectures or evolution and
proteid. She is too vivid, like a newly painted railing, but, like the
railing, she will tone down. She pretends to be very socialistic or very
fast; on the whole she affects rather the fast style. We must not
complain. Is not brown paint in the dining room worse than pink paint on
the face?

Whatever may be said about revolting daughters, I suspect that the
change in the parent has been greater than that in the child, because
the child in 1830 did not differ so much from the child of to-day as
might appear. Youth then was restless and insurgent, just as it is
to-day; only it was more effectively kept down. If to-day it is less
kept down, this is partly for reasons I will indicate, but largely
because the adult has changed. The patriarch is nearly dead; he is no
longer the polygamous brute who ruled his wives with rods, murdered his
infant sons, and sold his infant daughters; his successor, the knight of
the Middle Ages, who locked up his wife in a tower for seven years while
he crusaded in the Holy Land--he, too, has gone. And the merchant in
broadcloth of Victorian days, who slept vigorously in the dining room on
Sunday afternoon, has been replaced by a man who says he is sorry if
told he snores. He is more liberal; he believes in reason now rather
than in force, and generally would not contradict Milton's lines--

"Who overcomes by force
Hath overcome but half his foe."

He has come to desire love rather than power, and, little by
little--thanks m