in this period have produced Anatole France; but we did produce, as she admits, Whitman. She forgets, too, the beauty of revolt, the beauty of struggle, the beauty of the very rugged unformed state she abhors. That our standards of success are warped we cannot deny; but the avarice of the French is no prettier a characteristic than our money madness, and the striving of the present generations, Miss Cather, is building up wealth for the leisure of those quietly cultured souls you so miss in this welter of "cinema" and "radio" publics. You regret, too, the days long past when these new readers did not exist and only a fine, intelligent public greeted the best books. This, you say, Miss Cather, is not intended to be a snobbish attitude. You will not deny that it is, at least, aristocratic!

Writers not seldom accomplish reviews and these reviews are not seldom extraordinarily bad. extraordinarily bad. What does a

Writer care, really, about another's writing? In the name of goodness why, except as a codicil to the testament of personal friendship, should he care? Of course he may be jealous in a dignified way.

It is a mistake of the young and ignorant to suppose that Reading, Writing, and Reviewing are a wise or helpful mixture. These three R's fight each other. Frequently reconciled and housed in the same person, like conflicting traits of character, they are profoundly antagonistic. They check each other's growth; they mutually inhibit; and darkly shoving back and forth in the subconsciousness, they create a crush in the mental subway. Dr. Freud has not yet solved the transit problems of New York or other cities; but he or she who persists in all three of the modern R's will call in the psychoanalyst too late for the soul's salvation.

view with envy the Actors' Theatre with its superb rendering of "Candida", the Theatre Guild with "They Knew What They Wanted", Arthur Hopkins with "What Price Glory?" Perhaps he will wish to argue that the last named plays have their share of frank lustfulness. This would seem a poor retort. Sincerity rings in every word of the dialogue of these two fine plays, whereas Mr. Belasco, although we do not question his sincere love of the theatre, has not often seen life minus an oriental stage setting.

There are varying standards of what is proper and what is improper in theatrical circles. Jesse Lynch Williams's innocuous "Why Marry?", which would seem tame indeed in a season like this, when revived recently in a southern town lived up to its title in shocking a portion of the tender minded inhabitants. Yet motion pictures of far more violence are viewed there daily. "What Price Glory?" is assailed by

wiseacres, while vile acts in a half dozen of the current revues go unscathed. Mr. Belasco, however, is not alone in his tendency to drape the truth in obnoxious but apparently appealing garb; the public meets him more than halfway. Yet so, too, it meets the producers of fine plays. A few individuals are so blind as to consider "What Price Glory?" non-patriotic and an assault upon morality; but in the main, persons of all ages recognize its fundamental truth and beauty. The popular rewards to the authors and producer of this play, as well as a number of other fine productions of the season, are unqualified and hearty! Why does Mr. Belasco fail to find the worthwhile manuscripts? It is either lack of discrimination or bad judgment that forces so wise a man into the undignified position in which he now finds himself. Brothel keeping has always been profitable, but it is not a profession chosen by the most discreet.

THE

HE Doctor, opening the door of his cabin, beamed along the single file of his New York cronies waiting to enter, and bade them welcome.

The usual personalities had arrived the columnist who had been to Europe and was under the impression he had done something almost as remarkable as going to heaven, a publicity man who secretly liked his work, the commander of another steamer, and a writer of fiction. They sat where they could, bombarding the good doctor with news and questions, while he smiled his shrewd, sophisticated, yet entirely benevolent smile, and squinted into his cabinet with a view to discovering some "common denominator", as he called it, "that would go into all of them". He was evidently successful, to judge by the murmurs of approval, amid which he was understood to say he had had a strenuous voyage.

"Sick list?" asked the columnist. "No, mental vigor", responded the Doctor. "We have just brought back a crowd of college folk, mostly women, highly charged with culture. They radiated it. Some of it fell my way. I ought to feel intellectualized, but I only feel bored. What's the answer?"

"You don't care for highbrow females?" said the fictionist. The Doctor screwed his monocle into his eye and grasped the silver shaker which he had just filled with ice and the other ingredients.

"I don't love them", he muttered, as he vibrated the vessel with scientific

skill.

a

"And I don't mind them few at a time. We had a a plethora

of them this voyage, though. Ground grippers, intense spinsters, incipient missionaries with Bagster's Bibles, deep breathers, and interpretive dancers. The whole shooting match. They inspected the Acropolis and St. Peter's and St. Sophia, and they photographed each other in front of the Sphinx. Seventy eight separate copies of a leather bound, gilt edged volume entitled "My Trip Abroad" were found by deck stewards and listed at the purser's office for return. One of the junior clerks, who in an idle moment turned over some of the pages, has now a very peculiar notion of American feminine mentality. As he remarked to me one day, when mentioning it: "We all think those things, Doctor, but tell me, why should ladies write it down?"

"He thought you knew!" chuckled the Commander.

"And he was right", remarked the Doctor, carefully filling an adequate number of glasses with a fluid the color of cloudy amber. "A young woman from a place she called Bahston, of all cities, asserted to me the right of every American woman to express herself."

"How was that particular girl doing it?" inquired the publicity expert. "Keeping her schoolgirl complexion with cosmetics?"

"Partly", nodded the host; "but principally by traveling alone on a tour of European countries. She had a portable typewriter on her lap as she

lay in her deck chair, and everything, from the flash of a flying fish across the bows to the casual conversation of her neighbors and the thoughts of the books she was reading, was set down on many pages as we voyaged toward Europe, and filed in a loose leaf album."

"Well, but look here Doc," interrupted the columnist, who was sympathetic toward the Lucy Stone League, "just what are you getting at in criticizing those young women in their pursuit of culture? Don't you think they ought to? If not, why not? Would you have women remain ignorant and stupid? You ought to be frank about this, you know. This is the United States, not Turkey."

"True", replied the Doctor mildly, and as though reflecting upon past days. He seated himself comfortably in his big chair and polished his eyeglass. "True. By the way, have you ever had I won't say personal relations - but any contact whatever with a woman who has been raised in Turkey?"

The columnist, who, like all who ply his trade, was remarkable for his blameless domestic life, suspiciously admitted that he had not. He was suspicious because nobody ever knew exactly what the Doctor was driving at until - presto! the train was fired and the argument blew up.

"That's what I thought", said the Doctor gravely. "Now you know my friend O'Brien, surgeon of the 'Utopian'? He has been here once or twice when you came aboard. O'Brien, unlike myself, is married and lives in Harlem when he's ashore. He met his wife when working in the Near East. She is a Circassian and lived all her life in Turkey until she came here. She could not be induced to join a woman's club, and traveling alone would seem to her supremely

immodest and shocking. She is a homebody, as they say here- "

"A broodmare, in short", muttered the columnist.

"Now wait a minute!" begged the Doctor smiling. "She might give you that impression, but it would be a wrong one. She is comely, and a little diffident in company, yet she speaks eight languages. If you investigated you would discover that she can read D'Annunzio, Plato, Balzac, Cervantes, and Dostoyevsky in the original. Moreover - and this is what I want you to bear in mind - she has acute and original views of the surrounding American life."

"As how?" asked the fictionist. "I mean she is entirely unimpressed by the extraordinary luxury and extravagance of American civilization. She has not been here long enough to penetrate to the true inward quality of occidental life, but the number of motor cars and railroads, for example, make little impression on her. She thought the Pennsylvania Terminal was a church! I am not so sure she was not right, for if Americans worship anything nowadays, it is efficient transportation."

"Well, why not?" urged the advertising man. "That is one of America's great contributions to progress that and efficient communication."

"Quite so", agreed the Doctor. "And here is where my story bears upon our argument. You asked me if I wished woman to remain ignorant and stupid, and I can only reply that if she wants to remain so, I see no reason why she should pretend to be anything else or why she should be forced to assume a thin disguise of erudition. I would also add that a woman is not necessarily ignorant or stupid or ineffective because she has no traffic with the particular fashion

able shibboleths of the moment. The lady of whom I have been telling you would have no idea of what you were saying if you began to discuss psychoanalysis to her, or community uplift or the movement for better babies. She raised her own two babies, and when they were of school age turned their education over to their father. He, being something of a Britisher, was rather against the female element in boys' schools here and sent them to England. That's a matter of taste, I suppose. Anyhow, his wife's notion would be that it was their own family affair. Yes", the Doctor mused, "there is certainly a good deal of the broodmare about the business, I admit. I wonder if she's wrong, now.”

"And do you really suggest that such a way of life is superior to the intellectual American woman who goes to Europe to improve her mind and acquire culture?" said the columnist.

"By no means", replied the Doctor. "I am only trying to show you that a woman is not necessarily a dolt because she grew up in what you would call a degraded way of life. Not superior but different. You see, the trouble with the American educated woman is that with the perfecting of mechanical devices in and out of the home her chance of doing anything for a man has dropped to zero. She has been forced to seek some other outlet for her energies. And by virtue of the present American conception of society, which is that of the group, club, or section, all federated into one homogeneous organism, she can develop only on the lines of quantity production. The canning of provisions and consequent standardizing of quality has been followed by the canning of culture, and that again by the canning of personality. I am astounded these days by the identity of the ideas,

phraseology, and often the accent, of women from all over the Union. The amusing part of the average American girl's urge to express herself is that what she is expressing is not herself at all but the psychology of her group. I may be wrong, but I fancy that expressing oneself is either unconscious, or it is a mere pathetic gesture."

"You keep dodging the question, Doc", said the fictionist. "Why don't you like these girls traveling about and seeking to improve themselves? Come clean, man. You're holding out

on us."

"I can tell you in a word what it is I don't like", responded the Doctor; "though mind you, my not liking is no more than a prejudice. I don't like the 'we women' business. 'We women are going to do this that and the other fine thing.' 'We women have the right to wear trousers and knickers and so on.' Now don't run away with the idea I am a reactionary. When I complain of the 'we women' attitude I mean the fundamental self consciousness of the trick. I haven't the slightest objection to her wearing trousers and shooting boots if she can only do it without posing. But as soon as it is accepted as a commonplace, as soon as colored laundresses and cooks and Chinese laundrymen's wives wear trousers and shooting boots, as soon as she can no longer act a part, she'll be back into skirts at once. Of course, I am using the phrase 'trousers and shooting boots' to symbolize all things masculine. I am resigned to women's expressing their personalities, but I don't see how it can be done by striking attitudes in my clothes. So clear is this to me that after an attentive study of the American woman I can assert that she has less emotional influence over her men than has the woman of any other nation.”