derstand, that difficulty is to be solved by co-operative,
or composite, housing?"

"Something like that," he said again, but there was a note of misgiving
in his voice.

"What is the 'out'?" we asked.

"There is no 'out,'" he said, with a deep, evasive sigh.

XII

THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY OF NEW YORK

Later in the summer, or earlier in the fall, than when we saw him newly
returned from Europe, that friend whom the veteran reader will recall as
having so brashly offered his impressions of the national complexion and
temperament looked in again on the Easy Chair.

"Well," we said, "do you wish to qualify, to hedge, to retract? People
usually do after they have been at home as long as you."

"But I do not," he said. He took his former seat, but now laid on the
heap of rejected MSS., not the silken cylinder he had so daintily poised
there before, but a gray fedora that fell carelessly over in lazy curves
and hollows. "I wish to modify by adding the effect of further
observation and adjusting it to my first conclusions. Since I saw you I
have been back to Boston; in fact, I have just come from there."

We murmured some banality about not knowing a place where one could
better come from than Boston. But he brushed it by without notice.

"To begin with, I wish to add that I was quite wrong in finding the
typical Boston face now prevalently Celtic."

"You call that adding?" we satirized.

He ignored the poor sneer.

"My earlier observation was correct enough, but it was a result of that
custom which peoples the hills, the shores, and the sister continent in
summer with the New-Englanders of the past, and leaves their capital to
those New-Englanders of the future dominantly represented by the Irish.
At the time of my second visit the exiles had returned, and there were
the faces again that, instead of simply forbidding me, arraigned me and
held me guilty till I had proved myself innocent."

"Do you think," we suggested, "that you would find this sort of
indictment in them if you had a better conscience?"

"Perhaps not. And I must own I did not find them so accusing when I
could study them in their contemplation of some more important subject
than myself. One such occasion for philosophizing them distinctly
offered itself to my chance witness when an event of the last
seriousness had called some hundreds of them together. One sees strong
faces elsewhere; I have seen them assembled especial