r creating, developing, brightening
life along simple rather than outre lines, in so far as he himself was
concerned. Nearly all of his arts and pleasures were decorative and
homey. A good grocer, a good barber, a good saloon-keeper, a good
tailor, a shoe maker, was just as interesting in his way to Peter as any
one or anything else, if not a little more so. He respected their lines,
their arts, their professions, and above all, where they had it, their
industry, sobriety and desire for fair dealing. He believed that
millions of men, especially those about him were doing the best they
could under the very severe conditions which life offered. He objected
to the idle, the too dull the swindlers and thieves as well as the
officiously puritanic or dogmatic. He resented, for himself at least,
solemn pomp and show. Little houses, little gardens, little porches,
simple cleanly neighborhoods with their air of routine, industry,
convention and order, fascinated him as apparently nothing else could.
He insisted that they were enough. A man did not need a great house
unless he was a public character with official duties.

"Dreiser," he would say in Philadelphia and Newark, if not before, "it's
in just such a neighborhood as this that some day I'm going to live. I'm
going to have my little _frau_, my seven children, my chickens, dog,
cat, canary, best German style, my garden, my birdbox, my pipe; and
Sundays, by God, I'll march 'em all off to church, wife and seven kids,
as regular as clockwork, shined shoes, pigtails and all, and I'll lead
the procession."

"Yes, yes," I said. "You talk."

"Well, wait and see. Nothing in this world means so much to me as the
good old orderly home stuff. One ought to live and die in a family. It's
the right way. I'm cutting up now, sowing my wild oats, but that's
nothing. I'm just getting ready to eventually settle down and live, just
as I tell you, and be an ideal orderly citizen. It's the only way. It's
the way nature intends us to do. All this early kid stuff is passing, a
sorting-out process. We get over it. Every fellow does, or ought to be
able to, if he's worth anything, find some one woman that he can live
with and stick by her. That makes the world that you and I like to live
in, and you know it. There's a psychic call in all of us to it, I think.
It's the genius of our civilization, to marry one woman and settle down.
And when I do, no more of this all-night stuff with this, that and t