than does the benedict, safely entrenched
under the bed, who shouts out, "I defy thee, I defy thee!" as did
Mephisto when Goethe thrust him into Tophet.

* * * * *

The popular belief is that Xantippe, the wife of Socrates, was a shrew,
and had she lived in New England in Cotton Mather's time would have been
a candidate for the ducking-stool. Socrates said he married her for
discipline. A man in East Aurora, however, has recently made it plain to
himself that Xantippe was possessed of a great and acute intellect. She
knew herself, and she knew her liege as he never did--he was too close
to his subject to get the perspective. She knew that under right
conditions his name would live as one of the world's great teachers, and
so she set herself to supply the conditions. She deliberately sacrificed
herself and put her character in a wrong light before the world in order
that she might benefit the world. Most women have a goodly grain of
ambition for themselves, and if their husbands have genius, their
business is not to prove it, but to show that they themselves are not
wholly commonplace.

Not so Xantippe--she was quite willing to be misunderstood that her
husband might live.

What the world calls a happy marriage is not wholly good--ease is bought
with a price. Suppose Xantippe and Socrates had settled down and lived
in a cottage with a vine growing over the portico, and two rows of
hollyhocks leading from the front gate to the door; a pathway of
coal-ashes lined off with broken crockery, and inside the house all
sweet, clean and tidy; Socrates earning six drachmas a day carving
marble, with double pay for overtime, and he handing the pay-envelope
over to her each Saturday night, keeping out just enough for tobacco,
and she putting a tidy sum in the AEgean Savings-Bank every month--why,
what then?

Well, that would have been an end of Socrates. Xantippe was big enough
to know this and so she supplied the domestic cantharides and drove him
out upon the streets--he grew to care very little for her, not much for
the children, nothing for his home. She drove him out into the world of
thought, instead of allowing him to settle down and be content with her
society.

I once knew a sculptor--another sculptor--an elemental bit of nature,
original and, better still, aboriginal. He used to sleep out under the
stars so as to wake up in the night and see the march of the Milky Way,
and watch the P