that she is fitter to vote than he is. Of course she is, but that does not touch the real question, which is whether government will be better conducted with votes for all women than it is now. Those agitators talk about the "injustice" of depriving women of the ballot. They might as well talk of the injustice of the refusal of water to run up-hill. There's no injustice about it. It is nature. If it can be bettered, all right. Water will run up-hill if there is enough pressure behind it. But if injustice has been done woman about her vote, it was done when she was born female and not male, and the appeal from that lies to the higher court. Was there any done? Take it by and large, is it a misfortune to be born a girl and not a boy? That may happen to any of us any time we happen to be born. It's a toss-up. It's not the slightest In credit to us to be born male, and certainly it should not be the slightest discredit to us to be born female; but according as we are born male or female we are born to different duties. If political government is one of the male duties, civilization will not get ahead by having men loosen their hold on it. For my part I suppose that down in the intricacies of my composition I have an instinctive conviction, or hunch, that political government is a male attribute, and that out of that comes my objection to abdicate, or even dilute, my share of it. stinctive convictions have great weight in these matters, though the surface arguments they put out may be inadequate or mistaken, as the anti-suffrage arguments are so apt to be. The suffragist expounders demolish them, and think that they have accomplished something; but, alas! the demolition of puerile arguments leaves the question just where it was, with the pith of it still untouched. Still I think the agitation does good, bothering people like me, and making us think; asking us, What does belong to women, then, if not votes? How else are you going to give them equal life? What does justice demand for them if not the suffrage? If the males since the beginning of time have overestimated their importance and erred in regarding themselves as specialists in government, then it is only a matter of time when we shall be disabused of that error and shaken down into our rightful places. But if government-meaning political government rather than domestic-really prospers better in the long run in the hands of males, in their hands it is likely to stay-the substance of it certainly, however that shadow we call a vote may flutter off, and wherever it may alight. Nothing happens without a cause. If the men are to be abased, doubtless it will be for their abundant sins. If they will not work as men should, they will lose their jobs. If they will not govern as men should, they will be governed. History is a record of the strong races subduing the weak, and the wise the foolish, to the end that strength and wisdom should prevail in human affairs. In these days of Monroe doctrines and alliances and arbitration treaties those harsh processes seem to have been superseded. Is this invasion by women of the provinces of men a new expedient of Nature to preserve the competition that is essential to human progress? We cannot beat Nature. She is obdurate, resourceful, impossible to fool, with a trick to meet every trick that is offered her. She seems determined that man shall come to something, and plays man against man to make him better himself, and is probably equal, if occasion demands it, to play one half of him against the other. For of course that is what woman is-the other half of man. There cannot be a real competition between the two halves, for they are inseparably joined and have to pull each other along. But for all that, they are distinct individuals, and one in a given period may make faster progress than the other, with a good deal of disturbance of relations and equities and ideas. What man gets, woman gets; what woman gets, man gets. When woman gets education, liberty, opportunity, protection, the whole race gets those benefits. Then shall we say that when woman gets the vote the race is that much ahead? It may be, but to me it has not been so revealed up to these presents. Who gave man strength gave him dominion. If he loses dominion it will be because he has either misused his strength or lost it. Samuel has not lost his. He is truly a great power. As I have said, he is almost a complete occupation for his mother, and a profitable, satisfying occupation, too. I confess to fears in time past that girls of Cordelia's sort did not have enough to do to bring them their proper growth and keep them happy. If they didn't go to college and didn't marry as soon as they got out of school, they seemed to drift into a lot of occupations that looked rather futile, and like a mere provision for killing time. They played around, they visited, they dabbled in anything that came handy-dances, charities, house-parties, art, music, extra improvements for the mind—anything that could be cast into a void of time which should have ached, and doubtless did. It used to make me sorry for the girls because it seemed so hard for them to buckle down to any thing remunerative and continuous and really get ahead in it. If they did that, they forfeited too many opportunities of the leisure class, to which it seems to be intended that the daughters of the wellto-do, from nineteen to about twentythree, shall belong. If they went to college, that solved the problem for those years, but it came back at them as soon as they came out. If they were satisfied with their indefinite employments it was bad, and if they were not it was also bad. So I used to feel sorry for the girls because their job looked to me so vague, and their employments so fragmentary and unpromising. I dare say I was wrong, and that the girls were working more hours at their proper vocation than I had the wit to recognize. I see it more clearly now; that there are fruits that ripen best in the sun, and should not be hurried in the process; that Cordelia did not really waste those years in which she waited for me to get started as a wage-earner, but learned in them a kind of patience and useful domestication, besides other accomplishments that make her better to live with now. Major Brace has paid us the compliment to look in and inspect Samuel. He expressed himself as pleased with him, and was very gratifying in the warmth of his congratulations to Cordelia and me. Speaking as a father of almost complete experience, he told me of the special enthusiasm he felt for a child that had never run up a dentist's bill. Samuel hasn't. There is little or nothing about him as yet that would interest a dentist; but Cordelia, whose forefinger is a good deal in his mouth, says there may be any minute. I must ask mother if that is so. No doubt Cordelia's enthusiasm is liable to mislead her. I believe Cordelia dislikes to spend money. I find her perpetually weighing something that might be had against its price, and deciding not to have it. Unless the purchasable object is indispensable or very positively desirablelike a kodak to snap at Samuel-the money looks better to her. That's remarkable, isn't it? People differ in temperament as well as in training about that, inheriting tighter or looser fists, I suppose, according to the forebear they individually trace back to. To me, now, things that I want always look better than what money I have. It makes me unhappy to spend much more than I have, but I enjoy very much spending what I have got. I never have any money ahead, unless you can see savings in life-insurance, to which I make some inadequate pretense. Maybe that is a defect in my character, though accumulation on seventy dollars a week has its reluctances when you have a wife and baby and a cook and flat and all that. Still, if I had no elders to fall back on I'd have to pinch some salvage out of every dollar. But Cordelia is naturally more retentive than I am. It is remarkable how little she cares, relatively, for things. She has a good many things, and has always been used to them. She likes them, but with an interest that is altogether secondary, preferring power, independence, and tranquillity of mind to objects of convenience or embellishment, and to almost everything else except health and an easy conscience. She has a private fortune-I don't know that I have mentioned that—not large, but yielding sufficient income to buy her clothes. All girls ought to have private fortunes. Small ones will do: do better, perhaps, than larger ones, for I don't suppose it is quite ideal to be swamped by your wife's money. Cordelia gets a great deal of comfort out of hers, but I see her basis of expenditure is different from mine. Mine is adjusted to what I have; hers to what, on due reflection, she would rather have than money. On that basis she spends not only her own money, but mine. I dare say she will be a rich woman some day, and, I hope, still married to me; so there is a chance that, with other good luck, I may gather some surplus too. I believe she dislikes to shop; indeed I have heard her say so. There is a streak of Scotch in the Frenches, and I dare say it happened her way. My! my! What luck! When you think of the women-and men too, but especially women-whose highest happiness is to buy things and lug them home, it seems a marvelous dispensation that I should have acquired a companion of so opposite a sort. To be sure, no girl that was infatuated with the joys of purchase would have thought twice of me; and yet, who can tell, for I suppose there are girls who have neither self restraint nor self-denial about anything, and are liable to think they must have something that really would not suit them at all? I have always thought that Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch was the most fatal character in literature. What must it be to be moneygrubber for a woman like that, with an expensive appreciation of the material side of life and no conception of the rest of it! Stars above! how much better it is to be lucky than wise, especially in youth, when, as Major Brace assures me, none of us know anything. There was Solomon, who wrote the Proverbs, and Ben Franklin, who wrote Poor Richard; both able to make shrewd discourse by the ream, and neither of them fortunate on the domestic side. Probably it does not accord with the economy of nature that wise men should have wise wives; certainly if there is a scheme of things that is worthy of respect, it would not have fitted into it for me to have a foolish one. T'S the Second T The Miracle BY ROBERT HERRICK National! Mr. Stearns wishes to speak with you," said the stenographer, in a low tone, pushing the instrument across the desk toward her employer. As Langdon took the receiver from her hand he glanced sharply at the woman; his eyes continued to study her face while he talked with the official of the bank. "Yes, Langdon! . . . No, not to-day. I'll call the first thing in the morning-I said the first thing in the morning!" His usual low, controlled telephone voice rose irritably at the last words, and he clanged the receiver on the instrument bruskly. ... "We'll finish that letter now, Miss Condon," he said, and as he dictated the conventional business terms he was think ing: "Does she suspect? Of course she must! How much does she know?" The stenographer had been too close to him the past year, especially these last six months of desperate struggle when he was fighting ruin, not to have a pretty clear idea of the condition in which Langdon & Son was at this moment. She was too intelligent, too well-trained, not to know the full meaning of letters, telegrams, telephone calls-like this one from the president of the Second National. "Is that all, Mr. Langdon?" gently. "You needn't stop to-night for those letters-they can wait. I shall be down early to-morrow-early!" he repeated. "I'll be here, Mr. Langdon," and as she reached the door she murmured softly, "Good-night, Mr. Langdon." She was a good sort, the drab little stenographer, and her loyalty was strangely comforting to him. Then he drew toward him a sheet of paper with long lists of figures, interminable lists of figures wherein for months he had tried to find some loophole of escape. The conviction had grown upon him that in them lay no solution. For at least six months he had known his doom, had seen how inevitable it was, with all the relentless logic of the experienced, clear sighted man of affairs; nevertheless he had fought for a desperate chance - the bit of luck that never comes fought for time. "They'll know when it happens," he would mutter, "that I did the impossible to keep afloat this long." - A clerk came from the outer office and laid on the desk the last letters and a telegram. He found his employer huddled over the list of figures. Langdon nodded, but did not reach for the telegram. It made him sick to open tele The stenographer's gentle voice inter- grams these days. Once he had got to the rupted his musing. "Yes." The drab, silent little creature rose, gathered her papers, and moved softly toward the door of the outer office. Before she had reached it Langdon's voice rang out sharply: "Miss Condon! Come here, please!" She came noiselessly back to the desk and stood looking at him, waiting orders. In her clear, gentle eyes he could read that she knew all, and, more, that she was sorry, sorry for him, and would like to speak if she had dared. office even before his clerks to look over his mail, always buoyant and expectant of the turn in the tide to come that day. Something must happen, some help must come on the wings of mail or telegraph. And at first these had been reasonable hopes and expectations-delayed remittances, new business, and so on; instead of these he had found, morning after morning, disappointments, unlooked-for disasters, failures, protested drafts. Yet, like a boy, he had looked to the next mail to straighten matters out, then the next. Latterly, when the inevitable was too "Never mind, Miss Condon," he said, clear for such delusions, he had looked for the desperate, the fantastic. Once, years ago, he had bought a mine, and nothing had come of it; but possibly now, in his need? Then there was his mother's brother, an adventurous person, who had last been heard of in Argentine-he might suddenly come to life, having made good. An uncle with half a million dollars of spare cash in his pockets! To such storybook chances he had been reduced for hope. But now he hoped no more. Huddled up over his figures in the growing gloom of the evening, he stared unseeingly before him, and muttered, like a groan, the words that had been ringing dully in his brain for days: "Only a miracle can save me now!" At last he had come to that state of numbness which finality brings: he had little more to do with the matter. So he reached for the telegram and opened it. An out-of-town bank to which he had turned in his extremity refused to extend the firm's paper; he had known that they would refuse. And yet once, not many months ago, they were eager to have it. He tossed the telegram into the basket with the lists of figures and rose from his desk. The spring twilight had already fallen upon the great city, and as he stared out into the misty, twinkling space below he realized curiously that he was looking at the familiar battle-ground somewhat as a stranger. That was what defeat meant. He did not rouse from his torpor until an hour and a half later, when he was rushing through the April night to his country-place. The cool, damp air and the chirp of the frogs stole soothingly over his tired mind. It was always a relief to escape from the caldron of bricks and mortar where he labored into this silence, and so he had induced his wife to make a long season in the country. Soon it would be a luxury they could not afford. As the car turned into his place he saw that the house was brilliantly lighted, up stairs and down, and then he remembered that there were to be people for dinner. His wife was waiting in the hall. "Joe!" she exclaimed, with natural annoyance. "You're dreadfully late, and I telephoned Miss Condon specially to see that you got out in time. Hurry into your things-we're half starved!” VOL. CXXIV.-No. 739.-18 When he reappeared properly garbed, he found the guests lolling in the library, impatient for dinner to begin. As they sat down, Garvice, a man of secure fortune and an idler, leaned forward. "Business looking up, Joe?" Langdon suddenly hated the man. He suspected that Garvice had heard some gossip going about in the city. 66 About the same," he managed to reply, indifferently. "Oh, we don't want to hear you men talk business," the woman next him exclaimed, smartly. "We all know what that means these days. Whenever Ned is peevish, he puts it all down to the panic. Did you know that the Harrison Clarkes have bought beyond the Remicks?" So the dinner rattled off as such dinners do. Langdon said little. His wife looked over at him once meaningly to remind him of his duties. But he was oblivious. "It will mean a lot to her, poor girl!" he thought, and his brain repeated the refrain, " And only a miracle can save her-us, now." The party broke up much earlier than usual, as if every one felt the apathy of the host. When they had all gone, Langdon sank into a chair and stared at a picture that was revealed in the electric light. It was a large photograph of the Giorgione Madonna at Castelfranco. Mildred and he had been in the little Italian hill town on their wedding trip and had liked the picture. He could see it now glowing with soft color in the cool, empty church, as it had that day so many years ago. . . . He must tell Mildred to-night what was to happen. "You know, Joe, I don't think it was very nice of you to spoil my party like that!" His wife was standing between him and the picture, looking down at him accusingly, while she played with her long chain. "Sitting there like a ghost and never saying a word to any one all through dinner! How could you do it?" She was usually tolerant of his moods, but to-night she was evidently much annoyed. “Milly,” he began, and he noticed how queer his voice sounded. "I have some |