mark of a puny mind to consider the fortunes of anything smaller than an entire nation. A billion dollars, forty million souls, a million square milesthese were their units of discourse. They were gods, and whole peoples their puppets-but I can assure you that for a mere mortal it was a most exhausting evening.

But it was not utterly wasted. I learned at least one thing from my experience. You know how every year every college president tells the graduating class that they are standing on the threshold of a new life, that what the world needs is men who will be leaders, men of broad vision, and that the need was never so great as now. I have often wondered what a man of broad vision was really like, half fearing to meet one in the flesh because of a presentiment that I should not take to him. Now I know. Armitage is a man of broad vision, that's what he is. All such men should be shot at dawn. But, of course, the desire to shoot Armitage at dawn or at any other time is otiose and ineffectual. I must try to counteract his influence in less drastic and less conspicuous ways.

When I got home that night I made several resolutions. First, to stop at the drug store the next day and pay a long-standing account (perhaps I should say my bonded indebtedness) of thirtynine cents. Second, to tender a nickel in payment for four penny stamps at the post office and to count the change. Third, to take out citizenship papers in the state of Monaco (I think that is the one I mean), which has no foreign policy, no national debt, and a total population of about one hundred and thirteen. Fourth, pending this consummation, to adopt the philosophical theory known as solipsism. According to this doctrine I am the only existing reality; everything else exists only as my idea. After all, one must do something to restore the normal scale of life, and solipsism has the advantage of disposing quite neatly of Armitage.

VOL. CXLIV.-No. 864.-102

In that universe which is my mind I shall assign him a humble place: he will be one of my literary fictions.

PARTNERS IN POVERTY

BY RUTH LAMBERT JONES

NOT everyone can be

a Partner in

Poverty. Fewer still can occupy that position and enjoy it. Yet the recipe is exceedingly simple.

In the first place, one must be possessed of very little sense, even less money, and an aspiration to live in America's largest city. In the second place, find a friend endowed with the same qualifications, minus a husband (he may be deceased, divorced, or dispatched on a business trip), plus two husky children aged about eight and ten, respectively. (The children are absolutely essential since they provide numbers, a joie de vivre, and a stimulus which might otherwise be lacking.) Then choose your environment, preferably the garret of a rooming house run by Schwab's, or any other potentate's, excook, and bordering, say, the Ransonia, that hostelry honored by the presence of America's baseball wizard.

Let the approach to your garret be through a dank hall illuminated by a debilitated, red-globed gas jet, and up innumerable steep stairs, bathed in Stygian gloom and perfumed by the diverse aromas arising from sundry gas plates. Let your quarters themselves be two rooms, formerly one, but now divided by a beaver-board partition into a living room and an extremely narrow hall bedroom. Neither should you overlook the one closet outside in the hall, in which you will be forced to select garments entirely by sense of touch, since no ray of light ever penetrates its depths; nor the draughty bath, which is a day's journey distant; nor the "kitchenette,” which is an aperture off the living room about the size of a wardrobe trunk, containing two gas burners, three shelves, and four hooks.

Such conditions will almost automatically result in other conditions. The furnishings of your living room, for instance, will probably consist of one ponderous, black-walnut, marble-topped "buffet," with blear-eyed mirror and frosted-glass doors; one massive baizecovered table of the same vintage; four variegated chairs; one cot; one couch; one fireplace very much occupied by a gas heater; one very weather-beaten rug; and one electric-light fixture. Your bedroom will contain with great difficulty two beds, one bureau, and one chair.

These furnishings will have their limitations. The drawers of the buffet, which perforce you will use for a bureau, will stick; one drawer will be negotiable only by opening the door below it and poking from beneath. The table, although rooted to the spot whenever you desire to move it, will have legs so arranged that he who does not sit down to a meal gingerly will be the means of joggling over all the liquid upon it; also its casters will have the disconcerting faculty of coming off suddenly and uptilting one end. The chairs, all save one whose upholstering sags untidily floorward, will be models of straight-backed discomfort, gilded and tapestried relics of former splendor with large humps in the middle which create the illusion of toppling air cushions. The cot will be very fair as cots go, but the couch, as the children tell you, will be a bit sparse for sleeping purposes. Although a worthy and highly necessary supplement to the lone register which is supposed to heat the apartment, the gas heater will keep the atmosphere charged with its own peculiar odor. And the lights, always a little out of reach, always accessible only after much stretching and straining, will have a hard, unescapable brilliance which will render reading dangerous.

Your menu will be governed by your facilities for cooking and eating, and your facilities will be governed both by your lack of space and by your lack of finances. You will wash your dishes in the same bowl in which you wash your

hands, and your refrigerator, since the window ledge is taboo, will be the bureau in your bedroom.

You will become inured to many small hardships, such as telephone messages that are never delivered, call bells that are never rung the correct number of times to summon you to friends who are waiting below, hot water that is never hot when you most emphatically need it, cockroaches surveying you coolly from the pipes when you are in the midst of a bath, and the complications that attend the presence of milk and butter on your bureau, and the doing of laundry when the only place to hang it is over the brasses of your beds.

Under pressure of such circumstances you will constantly be forming and unforming habits. What you lose in fastidiousness you will gain in adaptability. It requires ingenuity to finish a bit of prose in the midst of roller skates, kewpie dolls, lollipops, darning baskets, shoe trees, and art catalogues, to the tune of a geography lesson being dinned into two unheeding pairs of ears. It requires ingenuity of a different sort to transplant without disturbance two buxom young sleepers back from your bedroom into theirs, which is your sitting room by day and which has just served as such for your evening's guests.

But what of the things for which you and your Poverty Partner will leave comfortable, roomy houses in the suburbs and expose yourselves to the rigors of chaos and cockroaches? What of the concerts, the exhibitions, and the plays? Will there be any wherewithal left, however meagerly you live, to pay for them, asks the skeptic? His cynicism can be the most conclusively answered by the program that will be yours.

You will revel in the galleries. Your education will range from the etchings of Whistler, Pennell, Bellows, Bruet, and Roth to the ethereal pastels and the exquisite silverpoints of Dewing; from the miniature water colors of Williams to the oils of Davis and Murphy, Carlsen and Symons, Crane and Redfield. You will spend seven successive afternoons in the crowded auditorium of that merchant who brings literature to the shopping public by the process of instituting a Bookman Week and having the authors roar in person before said public. You will see the younger generation confront the older on the platform; you will hear poets, novelists, globe trotters, dramatists, critics, actors, parodists, and editors declaim in the flesh. And it will cost you nothing.

You will happen upon the hundred and one little bookshops tucked away in a hundred and one unforeseen crannies and presided over by benevolent sages, young and old, short-haired and long, smocked and unsmocked. You will be permitted to feast your eyes upon first editions, presentation copies, and forbidden masterpieces, and your ears upon the pronouncements of authoritative habitués. And it will cost you nothingsave perhaps a pang that you have not the wealth to purchase a twenty-dollar copy of Jurgen.

You will haunt concert halls. You will gain there the peace and the understanding and the inspiration that music alone can give. You will share the thrill of a great audience rising to acclaim the entrance of the world-renowned Polish pianist who has come to hear his Russian confrère. It will be the same with opera. You will join in the ovation accorded the Russian who has created the most stupendous "Boris" in the annals of the city. And it will cost you nothing-if you have two good legs and are not afraid of using them-save the price of standing-room admission.

The theater will be yours, under like conditions, unless in a reprehensible fit of rashness you fall before the lure of the cut-price ticket agencies. You will run the gamut of melodrama and realism, of mystery and farce, of musical revue and the ultra-modernism which speaks in terms of "oneness and apartness and withoutness," with the result that you

will grow broad enough to see just how narrow your taste really is.

There will also be the churches. For he who is an atheist elsewhere usually proves the most devout of worshipers in the city where creeds vary from Bahaiism to Greek Orthodoxy, where the utmost simplicity of color and chanting and incense are to be had for the asking. So you will gain the help that comes from hearing powerful men speak the truth that is in their hearts. And it will cost you nothing save the traditional "widow's mite."

Then, in addition to the attractions just enumerated, the whole city will be yours to roam in as you will. From the Battery to Morningside and beyond, at any hour of the day or night, you may fare forth as the mood prompts you, unmolested, unchallenged. And it will cost you nothing save at the utmost the price of surface car or elevated, subway or bus; while, as far as the latter conveyance is concerned, you will experience no sensation comparable with the glorious detachment that pervades your being when, from its careening height, you survey the mellow vistas of the arch, the glittering minarets of Broadway, or the mist-swathed battlements of the Palisades.

Finally, there will be people as well as places-the people that you will meet in shops and the people that you will meet out of them. Of course there is the wellworn truism that people are alike the world over, in big cities and in small. But in big cities at least there are more of them from whom to choose. The South American composer who speaks English as badly as you speak French, the young poet who is in such revolt at modernism that he is called "the twentieth-century Keats," the Russian count who teaches ballet stars in the cinema and is possessed of a highly pressagented statuesqueness, the godlike English lordlet who, having come to America to retrieve the family fortunes, sells insurance and incurs the displeasure of his social mentors by living in "The Village" instead of the West Fifties, all will add to your stimulation.

Ah yes, says the skeptic, these various activities sound very feasible. But if you had to live in that uncomfortable sketchy way you'd think you were abused! All unwittingly he has reached the crux of the matter. For it is just your choice "to live in that uncomfortable

smoke from his perfect Havana cigar, Jill looking dreamily into the glowing coals.

And now came the astounding, incredible tale that Jack Dovecote had marched to his lawyer one morning, made over five-eighths of his property to his wife, gone to Europe, and left a letter saying that he was never coming back.

erty Partnership so delightful and so successful.

CHIVALRY AND THE EIGHTHOUR DAY

WHEN

BY PHILIP CURTISS

HEN the Dovecotes applied for divorce our town was simply aghast. Other divorces we had accepted as inevitable and with some of them we had been frankly relieved. In the case of the Taynkes, for instance, we had known for years that Tom Taynke was a drunkard and a scoundrel and that society as well as his wife was jolly well rid of him. On the other hand, in the case of the Jazzbergs, there was not enough money in the world to keep May Jazzberg completely satisfied, much less in the bank account of poor Arthur Jazzberg, who was an overworked actuary in the office of the insurance commissioner. But the Dovecotes! Why, the Dovecotes had been accepted for years as the perfect example of the ideal married couple! Both were attractive, well bred, and sensible. Their income was sufficient for rather more than a modest luxury. Jack Dovecote was a humorous, contemplative sort of man with just enough worldly viewpoint to make him tolerant. Jill Dovecote was a slender, gracious woman in whom a natural love of gayety never outbalanced a genuine love of her home. In fact, if one were called on suddenly to formulate a mental picture of the Dovecotes, one would have visualized them instinctively as sitting before their own charming fireplace, Jack Dovecote watching the rising

could have existed in that wide-open closet? For days we went around blankly, asking these questions over and over, until, one night at the University Club, Bill Deck, the professional bachelor and confirmed misogamist, abruptly put an end to them.

"The whole trouble was," announced Bill, "that Jack Dovecote got tired of being a blank, blank messenger boy!"

After any important crisis it is comparatively simple for the historian to turn back the pages of time and trace the events leading up to it. Bill Deck had placed his finger squarely, if brutally, on the one flaw in the Dovecote household, and, now that we looked back on it, any one of us could recall incessant instances. It was not that Jill Dovecote tyrannized over her husband; it was not that he himself was conscious of any vulgar subservience; it was simply that both of them had inherited, in abnormal degree, the Anglo-Saxon, or, to be more exact, the cultivated American, tradition of the knight and his lady's handkerchief. They were both to blame, in the sense that they were both innocent, for Jack Dovecote had encouraged this tradition as eagerly as had Jill-encouraged it, that is, until it had swamped him, until, in short, it had become so deeply a part of their common life that there remained no way to uproot it except to cut the whole business and run.

Before the separation, as I have said, one would instinctively have pictured the home life of the Dovecotes as one long reverie, sitting before the fireplace. Viewing it in the more critical spirit aroused by the tragedy, one saw that it had been really only Jill who sat, while Jack was eternally milling about on little duties either suggested by Jill or implied by her presence:

"Jack darling, I've left my handkerchief up in my room." "Sweetheart, these cigarettes aren't so good as the others. I think you'll find some of the kind I like in the pantry." "Dearest, I want to match those cretonnes up in the guest room. Would you mind going up and bringing down one of the sash curtains?" A minute later: "No, darling. I'm sorry. You'll have to go up again. I meant the ones with the tapes."

Now Jack, although he had an inherited income, was also a very conscientious professional man. He had daily problems which he liked to thresh out in his own mind before his fireplace, but these little interruptions both he and Jill accepted as a natural duty of their state of civilization. I do not think that Jack would ever have broken under the strain had not Jill, in an excess of good-heartedness, also taken to farming him out, as it were, to her friends:

"Jack darling, Elizabeth Prim is coming back from New York to-night. I told her that you would just run down and take her out to her house." "Dearest, Marjorie Daw didn't like to keep her chauffeur up so late, so I said that you'd be glad to go over to Helen Hunt's and get a cape she's going to lend Marjorie. By the time you've left that at Marjorie's I'll be all ready for you to come back here for me." "Sweetheart, I know that Mrs. Pelton would like a cheese sandwich or something before she goes home. Oh yes, Mrs. Pelton, I know you would. It won't take Jack a minute. And, Jack darling, while you're at it you might just as well make enough for us all. And, Jack! Oh, Jack! Before you do that, just go up and get those photographs of Maude's baby. If they aren't in my corner cupboard, they're in the tray of my trunk."

On the occasion of this last incident I myself was personally present and I know that none of us wanted a sandwich, not even Mrs. Pelton. We all took

them merely because it was easier than to argue, just as one accepts a second helping of fish; but Jack cut his finger with the bread knife and barked his knees trying to find Jill's trunk in the dark. He had been on his feet since dinner, anyway, fetching and jumping for things that nobody really wantedthe sort of ostentatious, superfluous service for which wealthy people keep an extra man. I don't know, of course, but I have often wondered whether it was after this particular session that Jack began to look up steamer routes.

There are certain subjects which the wise man leaves severely alone except possibly in print and the American woman's idea of chivalry is the most dangerous of them all. There are few other things which one cannot discuss frankly to-day in any social group. Suggest a man's right to be his own judge of his morals, and the result is merely an argument; but let any man even dare to question what Bill Deck would probably call "the bellhop functions of married life" and the trumpet blows. Instantly all the feminine members of the company will rally into a single compact formation, presenting a solid phalanx of bristling horns.

In practice, however, the question does not disappear because one ignores it, for, in its simple analysis, the Dovecote tragedy is only an instance of what inevitably occurs when any too vigorous attempt is made to exact a feudal privilege in an industrial age. History has more to say about the Dovecote affair than one would imagine.

Chivalry is essentially a military system. Its underlying idea is not one of service, but one of defence. In a vigorous clash of arms the healthy, chivalric male has always been delighted to fight for his lady's handkerchief, but even the Arthurian legends never went so far as to say that he was called on to wash and iron it.

Chivalry, as the modern American woman understands it, has degenerated into valetry. The mistake is not un