py Mrs. Carl Ericson did not have many "modern theories of marriage
in general," though it was her theory that she had such theories. Like
a majority of intelligent men and women, Ruth was, in her rebellion
against the canonical marriage of slipper-warming and obedience,
emphatic but vague. She was of precise opinion regarding certain
details of marriage, but in general as inconsistent as her library. It
is a human characteristic to be belligerently sure as to whether one
prefers plush or rattan upholstery on car seats--but not to consider
whether government ownership of railroads will improve upholstering;
to know with certainty of perception that it is a bore to have one's
husband laugh at one's pet economy, of matches or string or ice--but
to be blandly willing to leave all theories of polygamy and polyandry,
monogamy and varietism, to the clever Russian Jews.

As regards details Ruth definitely did want a bedroom of her own; a
desire which her mother would have regarded as somehow immodest. She
definitely did want shaving and hair-brushing kept in the background.
She did not want Carl the lover to drift into Carl the husband. She
did not want them to lose touch with other people. And she wanted to
keep the spice of madness which from the first had seasoned their
comradeship.

These things she delightfully had, in May, 1914.

They were largely due to her own initiative. Carl's drifting theories
of social structure concerned for the most part the wages of workmen
and the ridiculousness of class distinctions. Reared in the farming
district, the amateur college, the garage, and the hangar, he had not,
despite imagination, devoted two seconds to such details as the
question of whether there was freedom and repose--not to speak of a
variety of taste as regards opening windows and sleeping diagonally
across a bed--in having separate bedrooms. Much though he had been
persuaded to read of modern fiction, his race still believed that
marriage bells and roses were the proper portions of marriage to think
about.

It was due to Ruth, too, that they had so amiable a flat. Carl had
been made careless of surroundings by years of hotels and furnished
rooms. There was less real significance for him in the beauty of his
first home than in the fact that they two had a bath-room of their
own; that he no longer had to go, clad in a drab bath-robe, laden with
shaving materials and a towel and talcum powder and a broken
hand-mirror an