not that they ared a the least for ny of new. As the point of view changes, opinion. Of course I had tenced to convenons change, and since it is the qualify my statements, but I have ever rest arural thing in the world for each had a chance to to so, and JOKS is generation to have its own point of view, though I would have to vite vatts correspondingly natural for each really think about it if I am ever to get it generation to establish its own conven the concern, and it won't be long before they will be running the business all by themselves-why shouldn't they take a hand in framing the rules of the game? I'll admit that this may surprise some of them. They aren't used to hearing this kind of talk from us oldsters, and I'll admit also that it doesn't come as easily as it might in this instance. It's hard for us oldsters to concede things to the youngsters, hard for us to get together with them, so to speak; on the contrary, we seem to be standing each other off most of the time when it would be to the interest of us all to get together. However, perhaps it is just as well that we can't or don't. There are pros as well as cons to be considered. For a good many years, I have held that if the average youngster would only consent to take advantage of the experience of the average oldster, that youngster would become a superman or a superwoman in record time, but I am beginning to weaken on that score. Much as I dislike saying so, I am beginning to believe that it wouldn't work in more ways than one. There is no doubt that age makes us conservative. After we have been burned a few times by the hot stove of experience, we instinctively shy off from it. Our counsel takes on a decided flavor of conservatism, and conservatism doesn't go with the spirit of progress-progress has got to take a chance now and then. So, it's probably providential that the youngster walks up to life the way he does to a swimming-pool-shucking off his clothes as he goes and plunging in head first. The oldster is more apt to go slow, wonder if the water is cold, how deep it is, whether there are rocks or snags on the bottom, then decide that it looks muddy, and finally, if he makes up his mind to go in at all, does so by inches. So, I guess that the youngsters do wisely in taking their own counsel. For one thing, it occurs to me that it would go a long way toward slowing up the matrimonial market if the youngsters consulted their parents, for I have never yet known the father who didn't think his son ought to be a little better fixed before taking such a step, and I have never known a real mother or father who didn't feel that their daughter was mak ing a mistake in marrying the man she married. But there are a lot of people who don't feel the way I do. They are too far removed from the present ideas, and the gap between day before yesterday and tomorrow is more than they can bridge easily. Jazz has followed too closely upon the heels of the minuet for them to get used to the change. I can recall the time when the world considered us rowdy because we two-stepped, and I suppose people thought the same thing about my dad when he cut loose from square dances and the Virginia reel in favor of the waltz. Twenty-five years ago there would have been a riot as well as a scandal if the girls had appeared on the streets dressed as they dress to-day. Legs were taboo in those days, and the girl who laid aside her corsets except to bathe or go to bed was immodest, to say the least. All of which goes to show that it is merely the point of view. I may be wrong, but to my way of thinking it is not the things we do in public that need conventionalizing in the interest of public safety and morals, but rather the things we do in private. No, I haven't any fault to find with the youngsters. On the contrary, I envy them a lot. I envy them their youth, their health, their energy, their opportunities to do things, their unbounded expectations, their enthusiasm, their eagerness to get at life, tear it apart and put it together again in better shape. I envy them their independence, their cocky assurance. Yes, I envy them and from the bottom of my heart I wish them well. As I watch them starting out bravely and gayly along the beaten path of life, my only other feeling is that of regret, poignant and haunting, regret that I cannot lend them a hand over some of the rough spots, steer them away from some of the stumbling-blocks hidden from their young eyes, shield them from some of the storms they will encounter, spare them the disappointments life has taught me to foresee in store for them. But they don't understand that. They don't want any help. That's the saddest part of it for me to have to stand aside, helpless, with nothing left but to watch and hope. A Woman of No Imagination BY VALMA CLARK ILLUSTRATIONS BY GEORGE WRIGHT Would you take that lying down? Peter off like-like a wet sky-rocket? Oh, you would. But if you were a live one, and young, and if you had an ounce of good old Yankee spunk in you, you'd do what I'm going to HE bottle had rolled to do them all in. out onto madame's desk when Bess dug into her stuffed bag for francs to pay her tea bill. Madame exerted herself to the extent of taking it up. It was merely a pencil-thin phial filled with some colorless fluid, but the single, minutely printed word of its label, as it lay upward in madame's doughy palm, was like an explosion-venomous, damning. "Give it to me!" blazed Bess. But madame's liquid eyes merely drowsed out at her beneath the heavy, buttery lids. It struck Bess: the word was English, and the woman was so thick, so lacking in imagination. "Do you speak English?" she asked. "Je ne comprends pas anglais." "And I don't speak French." Bess got possession of the bottle, snapped it shut again in her bag. Then she broke, quietly as to voice: "Though you don't know English, I want to tell you that you're the world's most torpid woman. Dough without-without any yeast. . . . A bun without any currants. . . . In terms which you could understand, if you could understand anything. Through three weeks of teas I've watched you, squatting up there like one of your own bland cream puffs, all down about you people with their tragedies and their comedies, and you seeing nothing, dozing your life away as though life is a-a nap.' "Mais "Suppose"-Bess still spoke in that even voice, scorning emphasis as she scorned underlined words and undue punctuation, but the burned-out, vivid. person of her caught fire afresh-"suppose you had cakes to bake-a hundredno, a thousand cakes, and then some one told you that you had just a part of a day VOL. LXXVIII.-10 Bess collapsed into ruinous coughing, turned to the door. But Madame Beaup who had heard her through without a flicker of comprehension on her comely, round face, now stirred: "Un moment, mademoiselle-" She beckoned to a slack, grayish man at a near-by table, spoke to him in French. The man addressed Bess diffidently: "She says I'm to interpret; glad to-to give it to her in French for you." He was the pleasant-faced, rather indeterminate-looking one whom Bess had had difficulty in classifying. "Tell her for me"-Bess went up in a bubble of laughter-"tell her her brioches are good the best I've eaten." Madame Beaup dimpled her pleasure. "Thank you," murmured Bess; "good after—” But madame put out a plump hand, spoke again to the man. "A fresh tray is just coming up from the kitchen. She asks if you will not have another one, on the house; she will be hurt if you will not sample a fresh one." "Thank you, please thank her." Bess smiled indefinitely at him, moved toward the door. "But-but she's doggoned persistent; it seems to be a life-and-death matter with her." "You are an American!" wheeled Bess. "Yes." "I thought-only the stick-99 "I knew by the way you stepped out, by the way you carried your head. I've been watching you-if you don't mind." He was of a young-looking middle age, a long, slack, shy man, gray-suited, grayskinned, hair-that colorless, sandy hue of a gray beach. "I think I was homesick for an American to talk to me.' "Homesick!" She wouldn't go into that again, but she would go into madame again: "You see her!" she scorned, nodding upward. "The measure of her comprehension is a cake!" "But-but she'll hear you." "No English. She "But.. some intuition ..." "She hasn't any. You've watched them, all the people who come in here, seen how every mark on their faces comes out clear at just that twilight instant of tea-time: that governess with the whitefaced girl; the little bearded Englishman with the auburn curl right in the middle of his forehead-he's there, now, in the corner behind us; that fragile, sweet-faced old woman with the hat of black lace and roses, who said: 'Yes, we're back here at Menton; we never make any changes'? Stories. .. But they're nothing to that woman—so many pastries consumed, so many francs and centimes added.” "But you know I-I don't see her like that. She is a fine-looking woman in her way: a fine skin, magnificent dark eyeswell, character beneath the-the flesh." "Character! If you mean a nose and a chin," conceded Bess scornfully. "She's seemed to me like-like a sort of calm goddess sitting over her hectic little tea-room, seeing everything and giving no sign. Wild?" he laughed. "Crazy. You'll find I'm right." "The husband " crumb, "there he comes." A little thin creature with a waxed mustache, in a baker's apron and felt slippers, danced into the setting. He made a clattering of tin trays, and a temperamental clattering of words; he charged into the slumber of madame with language and gesticulations of anger. Madame merely heaved herself, with a motion as of turning over to the other side in her sleep. Monsieur danced off. He called upon the waitress and two customers to sympathize with him in his righteous indignation against that somnolent figure of a wife of his, but his emotional anger was not unmixed with admiration of the object of it as a hysterical wife at once chafes against, and is proud of, her rock of a husband. He danced back to his kitchen. Madame Beaup stirred and murmured a word to Albertine, the waitress. The girl served up to her mistress, with the tenderness of devotion, a plate containing the carefully peeled and separated segments of a tangerine. Madame plopped a piece of the fruit into her mouth. A customer stopped to speak with her, and she laughed out, a thick, rich laugh in her throat, like the bubbling of a rich pastry filling. She ate, and drowsed. "How the woman could snore!" Bess finished her. "Why do you hate her so?" "I don't know. It's-steadying to hate; I've got to hate some one, I guess.' "Because you . . . love every one." He handed it to her with the shyness of a child giving a lady a flower. His eyes were gray, like the rest of him, and his voice drawled, Yankee-fashion. Almost Bess relaxed. "You are a writer," he decided. "I've written a little stories. You too?" "No. Where- -?" "Magazines- Oh, nothing-nothing; I could have written good ones." "You will write good ones," he amended. She let it pass. "This morning I had an idea-" Her hat came off, and her black hair, which was cut short and worn carelessly and uncompromisingly straight, came out. More "There," nodded Bess, stabbing a than one person in the tea-room looked at |