f a buggy down
the street, and knows that it must be nearly midnight and that her mate
is coming. She slips the book back into its place of concealment, picks
up "The Harmonious Universe," and walks with some show of grandeur in
her trailing garments down the stairs to greet her lord.

"You up?" he asks. He glances at the book and continues: "Reading that
damn trash? Why don't you read Browning or Thackeray or--if you want
philosophy Emerson or Carlyle? That's rot."

He puts what scorn he can into the word rot, and in her sweetest,
falsest, baby voice the woman answers:

"My soul craves communion with the infinite and would seek the deeper
harmonies. I just love to wander the wide wastes between the worlds like
I've been doing to-night."

The man grabs the book from her, and finding her finger in a place far
beyond the end of the cut leaves, he looks at her, and sneers a profane
sneer and passes up the stairs. She stares after him as he slowly
mounts, without joy in his tread, and she follows him lightly as he goes
to his room. She pauses before the closed door for a lonely moment and
then sighs and goes her way. She mumbles, "God is good and I am God,"
many times to herself, but she lies down to sleep wondering whimperingly
in a half-doze if Pelleas and Melisande found things so dreadfully
disillusioning after all they suffered for love and for each other. As a
footnote to this picture may we not ask:

Is the thing called love worth having at the cost of character? The
trouble with the poets is that they take their ladies and gentlemen of
pliable virtue and uncertain rectitude, only to the altar. One may ask
with some degree of propriety if the duplicity they practiced, the lying
they did and justified by the sacredness of their passion, the crimes
they committed and the meannesses they went through to attain their ends
were after all worth while. Also one may ask if the characters they
made--or perhaps only revealed, were not such as to make them wholly
miserable when they began to "live happily ever after"? A symposium
entitled "Is Love Really Worth It?" by such distinguished characters as
Helen of Troy, Mrs. Potiphar and Cleopatra, might be improving reading,
if the ladies were capable of telling the truth after lives of
dissimulation and deceit.

But let us leave philosophy and look at another picture. This time we
have the Morton family.

The Captain's feet are upon the shining fender. There is no fire in