"whom she should find it impossible not to love, and very possible to fear." But times changed, and for a generation at least, the only hero the heroine would look at was a man no one could fear, because he was so full of the milk of human kindness. He still persists, but another type has come in lately. If you wish the double thing illustrated, look at the two most popular novels of the last year and a half: If Winter Comes, and The Sheik. The hero of the one is the apotheosis of the gentle humanitarian; the hero of the other is the cave man, pure and simple, with the necessary modern adjuncts of sophistication and good looks. I do not know quite what it is that sells If Winter Comes; but it is clear that it is the cave man that is selling The Sheik. The jokes about its being read only by young girls in boarding schools and old maids in boarding houses are beside the point. Whoever has made its popularity, it is popular. It so happens that among the very few of my highbrow friends who have condescended to read The Sheik, the only one who had a good word to say for it was a man. But if it is the unenlightened women who are reading it, that is all the more significant. Fifteen years ago, I am quite sure, The Sheik would not have had its phenomenal success. The sheiks of those days were created by Mr. Robert Hichens, and they neither went so far nor were considered anything but villains. It was the woman's fault, in the first place, and she repented bitterly in the end. Mr. Hichens offered us a quite different ethic. In other words, when Mr. Hichens' Arab began to treat the English lady rough, she became disillusioned about him. Not so, nowadays. I remember being shocked to the core, some years ago, by a certain short story. I will not identify it further than to say that it appeared in the most popular of American monthlies and was written by one of the most popular of American authors—a man, by the way. It showed cave-man tactics employed by a suffering but civilized husband to bring a spoiled wife to her senses. This donnée has since become fairly familiar to readers of fiction. We have all been brought up on the axiom that, whatever a woman does, a gentleman may retaliate only verbally. Apparently the convention is changing. At least, there is documentary evidence now to prove that, according to standards prevailing in the magazines, a man may retaliate physically in one particular case. If she bites, that is. She may still, I suppose, throw a plate at him, or threaten him with a pistol, and his only reply must be a sorrowful word of reproach. But if she bites, he may hit her. Whether this has become to any extent a convention in life I do not know. We will hope that, in life, ladies who are beautiful as the dawn and wear clothes to match their beauty, whose lives have been "sheltered" and whose mammas are the mold of form, do not bite, even when they are irritated by their husbands. The extraordinary thing is that they should be biting in contemporary fiction. In all Kipling I recall only one lady who bit her husband, and she was a native of Kafiristan, wedded amid much conch-blowing, against her will. And when you consider our standards, it is almost more extraordinary that the husband should hit back. Is it because so many of our novels and short stories are written by women that the man hits back? Because, that is, the woman, having no illusions about her own sex, does not quite see why he should put up with every sort of deviltry from women? Not wholly. For, as I say, it is not only female authors who go in for "rough stuff." I said we were not discussing "literature"; but it is not only The Sheik and such things that show a new attitude. Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer (the same who protested against the setting up of feminine standards in fiction) is at the moment one of our most considerable novelists. If Mr. Hergesheimer had written Cytherea a dozen years ago would he have included the very ugly parting scene between the hero and his wife? Would he even have imagined it that way: two ultracivilized people condescending to physical conflict? I forget whether Mrs. Randon bites-perhaps she scratches. I know that her husband strikes her. In Brass, Mr. Norris does not pretend to be dealing with civilized or delicately nurtured people; the physical conflict is more credible. But Cytherea does preBut Cytherea does pretend to be dealing with well-bred and sensitive folk; and that Lee Randon of the fine-spun psychology should treat Fanny rough seems to me a sign of the times. Whatever else has changed, one fact remains unquestioned: the physical superiority of the average man to the average woman. Our exaggerated chivalry itself was based upon it. Men gave women every advantage because women were not capable of snatching advantages themselves. If heroes are beginning to use the strong arm on heroines, it is not because we think that the heroine's arm is, relatively, any stronger than it ever was. Simply, authors are transferring to civilized society the kind of scene that we were used to witnessing (vicariously) in the jungle and the slum. We always knew what the tactics of the Hottentot were; we always knew that the husband of a Badalia Herodsfoot beat her if he was not pleased with her conduct. We read about cases in the newspapers constantly as we might have read about arson, or any other amusement of the criminal classes. But we did not take away for summer reading novels that showed gentlemen, with the full approval of the author, swinging their clubs like the cave man. Let me say, here and now, that I am not confusing the civilized cave-man fiction with the literature-which we also have with us that is preoccupied with cruelty. There is a vein of sadism in modern literature-but a very thin vein, fortunately, and probably no more manifest now than it has been in all periods. For illustration, let me mention Mr. Thomas Burke. Limehouse Nights and More Limehouse Nights are merely morbid phenomena; they could always have existed, and they have nothing to do with the trend of the times. The story I have alluded to as shocking me some years ago shocked me because it also had a hint of morbid psychology in it. But, generally speaking, there is nothing morbid in the new cave man. Indeed, he is usually too funny to be morbid. I suspect that writers do not do him very well because he is not yet familiar to them in the flesh. What it all comes to, as evidence, is merely this: that women no longer, to the same extent, occupy the pedestal. Whether it has been slipped from under them, or whether they have kicked it away, I do not presume to judge. The point is that conventions are changing; that a man is no longer supposed-in popular fiction-to put up with anything and everything from the woman of his choice. If she behaves outrageously, he can take the situation into his own strong hands. If she bites, he can hit back. For note that the new cave man is always in the right, and a mere dispenser of justice. He never hits first; he always has extreme provocation; treating her rough is his last resort. Merely, he has now become executioner as well as judge. I said the fault was Eve's. I believe it is, in the sense that women in our civilized world have assumed every superiority they could think of, and have been unmolested in their assumptions. The pendulum-if not the worm -was bound to turn. Every possible basis of equality or difference between the sexes has been argued. There remains only one absolutely undebatable proposition: namely, that man is physically stronger than woman. If you take every other argument away from him, it is perhaps natural-if not logical-that he should use his fists. Possibly the war accustomed us all over again to the old idea of settling a con troversy by force. Perhaps people men and women alike—are tired of one convention and looking for another. Perhaps we are never allowed, for more than a few decades at a time, to lose sight of any fundamental fact-such as the physical superiority of the male. Perhaps though I doubt it-a reactionary philosophy is showing its head, and there is gathering a little group of earnest thinkers who believe that the law of the cave was logical—that the cave woman should obey the cave man and be hit over the head if she does not. No; I very much doubt that. Nor, I confess, do I see any evidence that the new convention has entered into life itself. I see plenty of evidence that the famous "flapper" is not treated with much respect by her male counterpart, but I see no evidence that she is not still treated with kindness. There must, I suppose, in the acquaintance of any one of us, be married couples who differ vitally and say unpleasant things to each other; but I scan the human beings I know in vain for any sign that, like Mr. Hergesheimer's Randons, they would attempt to do each other physical hurt. I am sure that most of the women I know, though most of them promised at the altar to obey their husbands, have never considered that obedience in any but a rhetorical sense; yet I cannot fancy any of them biting, and if they did, I can still less fancy their husbands beating them. I confess myself as much at a loss as anyone to know whence comes the warrant for this new literary fashion. But that it should be there I find very interesting. I incline to believe that, civilization being a highly artificial and compli cated machine, any slipping of a cog is going to throw outlying parts out of gear. "Sit tight, rivets, every one." Chivalry presupposed a certain attitude in the woman as much as in the man. It was, besides, one of the most delicate inventions of the human mind. When women abandoned most of the postures chivalry required of them, the man's complementary postures became untenable. As the new adjustment has not yet been invented, it is natural that some questing minds should slip back to an earlier formula. Of course the world is not going back to an earlier formula-it never does. We shall eventually get something more plicated and more delicately adjusted than chivalry. What wonder if, in the interval, people sit down, to look round them for a solution, on a few bedrock facts? I have no notion that civilization is going, even for a period, to take its law from the Cave. But it is very interesting that the Cave should have become, in any quarters, fashionable in our own day; and there is no question that it is. Twenty years ago no popular author would have permitted an ultra-civilized hero to drag an egotistical wife off into the solitudes and beat her. Twenty years ago, even if The Sheik had been printed, a million people would not have read it. Twenty years ago no transparency at a college commencement would have counseled, even humorously, "Treat 'em Rough." And as, while many periods of history are more attractive than our own, none can, by the nature of the case, be so interesting to us, we who like to keep our fingers on the pulse of things must note such fashions and wonder whimsically "Why?" OURSELVES WHEN OLDER BY ALEXANDER PORTERFIELD MOLONEL CHENISTON stopped short, as if suddenly transformed to stone that voice! How it carried him back! Then, quite as suddenly, he realized the absurdity of it, and, clutching wildly at his manners, took off his hat and turned his distinguished though rather startled profile slowly and inquiringly toward the youthfully slender lady in black he had just passed. She smiled brightly, expectantly; it was evident that she, in turn, had mistaken him for some one else; but the remarkable thing about the whole business was the fact that she did look amazingly like Mrs. Arbuthnot. She was very fashionably dressed, with a marvelous hat balf shading her face; her furs hung negligently from slim shoulders; a number of bright jeweled bangles which dripped from her wrists clinked and jingled together delicately as she moved her hands. She was astonishingly like Eleanorslim, lovely, valiantly youthful. more overwhelming than any of these things, was the sound of her voice. It was low, deliciously liquid, thrilling. It assailed his senses exquisitely; indeed, Colonel Cheniston felt as if the world he had known for the past five-andtwenty years had miraculously vanished in that soft April sunshine which filled Green Park; he was a boy again, about to sail for India to join his regiment-a thousand ghostly half-forgotten memories faintly stirred. She was poor old Tommy Berringer's cousin, he remembered, and people always said she was unhappily married-but, good heavens! that was more than five-and-twenty years ago. She was gray now probably -and very probably a grandmother! Colonel Cheniston rapidly returned to earth. It occurred to him that he had COLONEL CHENIST IN too to But, helped himself too liberally to that '87 port after luncheon-that was it. It couldn't be Mrs. Arbuthnot. And yet-well, it was extraordinary that each should have been so completely mistaken in the other-there was something unmistakable about that low reproachful voice. "Chris!" "I-I beg your pardon," said Colonel Cheniston. "Oh, Chris!" exclaimed the lady in black tragically, "have I changed so terribly as that?" Certainly, it was very extraordinary. It stood to reason that it couldn't be Mrs. Arbuthnot but it was, apparently, some one else. Some one he had met at Simla, possibly-or Calcutta. Colonel Cheniston hurriedly ransacked his memories. "I'm sorry," he said eventually, "but I'm afraid "You don't know me?" "Oh, of course! Only, for the moment, you know-" He paused, and smiled rather vaguely, and thought about Mrs. Arbuthnot. There was nothing bitter in these reflections; as a matter of fact, they were extremely kind, courtly, half-conscious things which passed back and back through the dim meadows of his mind in a faintly gay, faintly glamourous procession, and gave him a rather charming unworldly air of wistful dignity. Consequently, he was astonished directly to perceive a look of hurt perplexity upon the face of the lady in black. It was ridiculous, of course, but it made her more like Eleanor than ever. "You don't, really?" she said presently. Could it be Eleanor? A certain sud den uneasy suspicion that such indeed was the case hovered upon the outskirts of Colonel Cheniston's bewildered intelligence, much as a tame pigeon might hover upon the imminence of a cyclone. Those hurt, averted looks! That exciting and slowly remembered perfume! Those beastly jingling bracelets! But, most of all, that voice!-it was almost impossible to doubt that! Colonel Cheniston made a little helpless baffled gesture of uncomprehending acquiescence. "I-I can't," he said. "My dear Chris, don't be silly. Naturally, I've changed-" "That's just it," explained Colonel Cheniston, speaking very quickly and wondering whether it could be that confounded port, after all, or his own sight, "you haven't." "Why, to look the same dashed pretty girl you did-er-quite a time back." Mrs. Arbuthnot smiled. "God helps those who help themselves," she remarked, rather cryptically. "I see," said Colonel Cheniston, who didn't, as a matter of fact, but who felt called upon to say something. It was amazing how young she really looked-no wonder he could hardly believe his eyes. Even the scent of lilac in the air, the soft sunshine of Green Park, the sedate procession of traffic in Piccadilly and the immensity of Buckingham Palace seemed divested of any actuality; they were merely items of a vast uncertainty. He was vaguely aware that the fat dark buds of the plane trees were bursting into a delicate green leafiness; near the Palace the tulips in the flower-beds behind the smooth stone balustrades were flamingly bright in the slanting sunshine; above everything, very clear and slender against the warm blue-and-white sky, he observed the campanile of Westminster Cathedral resolutely pointing to another world. But Colonel Cheniston seemed to be standing behind life itself; as he looked at Mrs. Arbuthnot he felt as if he had glanced back into a world which lay lost beyond the horizons of time-hidden away back of the plane trees in Green Park, the Palace, the housetops of Westminster, and the campanile of the Cathedral. Either way, one world seemed as unreal and remote as the other. It occurred to him that he ought to be conscious of tremendous elation; five-and-twenty years ago, now well, there was no earthly use going over that again-he was startled to discover that he felt only an immense amazement. It was simply incredible that time could deal so lightly with anyone as it had dealt with Mrs. Arbuthnot -indeed, it might be said to have dealt with her not at all. "We must see something of each other now you're back," he heard Mrs. Arbuthnot saying. "Let me see—' "To-morrow?" interrupted Colonel Cheniston. It was not what he intended to say but-after all, she was still a very beautiful woman-he felt he owed her that. Mrs. Arbuthnot reflected. "Not-not later," urged Colonel Chen iston. "Well, I can't say you've changed, really," said Mrs. Arbuthnot, abandoning her reflections by way of reply. "You're you're just the same." "No, I've not changed." Mrs. Arbuthnot did not speak for a minute or two. She simply stared at Colonel Cheniston wonderingly, ap |