s?" Thomas grew uneasy, and smiled in a sickish
fashion, and entreated me with his eyes to pick my cigar and let him go.
But I was in the full swing of new-found righteousness. "There's nothing
wrong, is there, Thomas?" And he replied, "I beg pardon, sir; but
Henry's my name. Thomas was my predecessor. He left, you will remember,
sir, a year ago last May." "But everybody calls you Thomas." "The
gentlemen were used to the other name, sir."

Might Professor Wilson Stubbs be wrong, after all, I thought. Perhaps no
one is really expected to know what everybody ought to know. I don't
know the name of my Congressman. But neither do I know the name of my
butcher and my grocer; and my butcher and my grocer can slay me with
typhoid or ptomaines, whereas the utmost my Congressman can do is to
misrepresent me. I don't know the man who makes my cigars; he may be
consumptive. I don't know the critic who supplies me with literary
opinions, and the scholar who gives me my outlook upon life. I don't
know the man who lives next door. From the decent silence that reigns in
his apartment, I gather that he does not beat his wife; but that is all.
Yet he and I are supposed to be bound up in a community of interests. We
both belong to the class whose income ranges from $2,000 to $4,000 a
year, of which we spend 38 per cent. on food; and we raise an average of
2-2/3 children to the family, and are both responsible for the wide
prevalence of musical comedy on the American stage. But I have seen my
neighbour twice in the last three years.

So that was the end of it. And because it was late in the afternoon, I
thought I would telephone to the office that I was not coming back. But
for the life of me, I could not think of my telephone number; and Henry
looked me up in the directory.

XVII

THE CHILDREN THAT LEAD US

The mayor sat before his library fire and shivered, and kept wondering
why there was no clause in the city charter prescribing a minimum of
common sense for presidents of the Board of Education. A man thus
qualified would know more than to suggest an increase of three million
dollars for school sittings. The city's comptroller was crying
bankruptcy; the newspapers were asserting that the mayor's nephew was
head of a favoured contracting firm not entirely for his health; and the
Board of Education wanted three million dollars. The mayor had a touch
of fever. The steep rows of figures in the Education Board's memorandum
cu