.

AJAX: An occasional request to empty the ice-box pan would also be
an artful echo of domesticity.

SOCRATES: Of course the success of the scheme would depend greatly
on finding the right person for matron. If she were to strew a few
hairpins about and perhaps misplace a latch key now and then----

AJAX: Socrates, you have hit upon a great idea. But you ought to
extend the membership of the club to include young men not yet
married. Think what an admirable training school for husbands it
would make!

SOCRATES: My dear fellow, let us not discuss it any further. It
makes me too homesick. I am going back to my lonely apartment to
write a letter to dear Xanthippe.

[Illustration]

WEST BROADWAY

Did you ever hear of Finn Square? No? Very well, then, we shall have
to inflict upon you some paragraphs from our unpublished work: "A
Scenic Guidebook to the Sixth Avenue L." The itinerary is a frugal
one: you do not have to take the L, but walk along under it.

Streets where an L runs have a fascination of their own. They have a
shadowy gloom, speckled and striped with the sunlight that slips
through the trestles. West Broadway, which along most of its length
is straddled by the L, is a channel of odd humours. Its real name,
you know, is South Fifth Avenue; but the Avenue got so snobbish it
insisted on its humbler brother changing its name. Let us take it
from Spring Street southward.

Ribbons, purple, red, and green, were the first thing to catch our
eye. Not the ribbons of the milliner, however, but the carbon tapes
of the typewriter, big cans of them being loaded on a junk wagon.
"Purple Ribbons" we have often thought, would be a neat title for a
volume of verses written on a typewriter. What happens to the used
ribbons of modern poets? Mr. Hilaire Belloc, or Mr. Chesterton, for
instance. Give me but what these ribbons type and all the rest is
merely tripe, as Edmund Waller might have said. Near the ribbons we
saw a paper-box factory, where a number of high-spirited young women
were busy at their machines. A broad strip of thick green paint was
laid across the lower half of the windows so that these immured
damsels might not waste their employers' time in watching goings on
along the pavement.

Broome and Watts streets diverge from West Broadway in a V. At the
corner of Watts is one of West Broadway's many saloons, which by
courageous readjustments still manage to play their useful part.
What used