C

Keep the Road Open

ONGRESS has put us all in the banking business. As bankers we have not proved ourselves successful, and the need to try it no longer exists. However, in reviving the War Finance Corporation "to help the farmer," Congress has for the moment put us all back in the banking business.

Congress says this has been done to move foodstuffs that are a burden to us into countries where they are a necessity. But the countries that need them most cannot pay for them in cash, and our war emergency tariff on imports will make it increasingly difficult to pay for them in goods.

Politicians are not economists, and politicians think that governments can alter basic economic laws. They mean to say to the growers of wheat and cotton: "Your wheat and cotton are not selling at the present price, so we will arrange to increase the price. The nations to which we will sell are insolvent, but, nevertheless and notwithstanding, we will increase the price."

To get money the revived War Finance Board must borrow it from the public. Does the public want to lend money to other countries without proper security? It is not good banking. However, it is the way government conducts banking. Collier's believes it is time for our Government to get out of this kind of banking.

Not much headway will be made before President-elect Harding takes office. Perhaps this problem will engage the mind of some economist in his Cabinet, who will quickly find out that the best business minds of America are opposed to the revival of the War Finance Corporation for the reason that it will defeat the purpose for which it was resurrected.

THE

HE same astute economic minds that revived the War Finance Corporation are engaged in visiting an emergency tariff on imports to this country. Nations with credit that is nearly exhausted cannot pay in cash for our goods, or do not want to pay war prices for our goods. To these nations we say: "Very well, if you cannot pay us in cash, we will make it difficult for you to pay us in goods."

Although the revival of the War Finance Corporation was not born out of sound economic thinking, yet the child is on our doorstep. Shall we sweep it off, or shall we try to bring it up to be a useful citizen?

To help the farmer, without consequent demoralization of other export trade, we should direct the activities of the War We

nance Corporation to the establishment of sound international financial cooperation, and allow the present foreign credit situation to be closed up satisfactorily by those private bankers who are parties to it.

Let us start our wheat and cotton moving at the best prices obtainable. Let us not encourage further holding off in the sale of them, in the hope of securing higher prices, thereby defeating our purpose to bring down the high cost of everything.

Encouragement of export trade has been talked about a great deal. We have been so busy arranging for export business, and doing so little actual exporting of merchandise, that we are marking time. To be a big exporter we must be a big importer as well. Tariff walls against imports will be met by tariff walls built up by those to whom we would sell our goods.

The American public likes truth. What member of Congress will step forward and explain to his constituents that to keep factories running at full blast we must export merchandise? Who will say that we are not self-sustaining? Who will say that we need imported goods too?

Who will tell his agricultural constituents that one of the greatest consumers of farm products is American labor, and that anything which limits the earning power of American labor limits the workingman's consumption of farm products? Who will have the courage to tell his farmer constituents the difference between overproduction and underconsumption? For there is a difference. Central Europe is a great potential market for American goods-but is it consuming them at the moment?

THERE

HERE are just three factors in trade-
all human. They are:

The man who has something.
The man who wants it.

The man who transports it from one to the other.

And there are only five material things men want. They are:

Things to eat. Things to wear. Things to travel in. Things to amuse. And something to be a symbol of the human value man places on the other four things.

All these things either grow on the ground or are dug from it. Our cities, our houses, clothes, food, mills, railroads, steamshipsall are petals in the great flower growing out of the earth from the seed of human endeavor.

And government's sole duty is to keep open the road for all to attain what they desire of the five material things men want.

That is what Collier's meant when it printed in its platform:

"Take the Government out of business that it was never intended to do, and cannot do well."

And that is what John Hays Hammond meant when he said in Collier's a few weeks ago:

"The best thing that the Government can do is to keep the roads to success open, to see that no one erects barriers on them. And to see, most particularly, that it does not erect barriers itself. Most of us ask no more.”

The three branches of American government the legislative, the executive, and the judicial merely have different functions applied to the same task, which is to make, execute, and interpret fairly the rules for human conduct.

The administration of these rules is the basis of all government.

There is only one remedy for bad or shortsighted government. It is very simple. It will not be fully heeded. But here it is:

Let the individual, yourself, vote deliberately for capable and honest men for every government office, national, State, and local, from the lowest to the highest, from dog catcher to president.

Our chief trouble is that we take no enduring pride in government that is good. How, then, can we expect the men whom we elect to take much pride in making it so?

Our sense of values in this respect is sadly awry. Until we change it for the better, we must expect government to accord this nation's problems such superficial treatment as that meted out to the farmers in the form of war finance resurrection and preferential agricultural tariffs.

Let the Seller Beware

HERE has been quite a lot of talk about cutting prices to stimulate business. And quite a few folks seem to have found that doctrine to be good medicine for their present troubles.

But not much has been said about another and equally important part of business getting terms.

Are we getting terms back to a prewar basis?

Hidden away in most of us is at least a little of the "public be damned" idea. Two years of a so-called sellers' market brought it to the surface in a good many places, although it wasn't always labeled with its proper name.

With orders to pick and choose from, we naturally took those most desirable to usin other words, those we could take on our own terms.

That gave us a chance to write into our terms all the reforms we had wanted to make, but hadn't had the backbone to do before. Delivery terms, service terms, minimums and maximums, discounts, agencies, territories-all came in for revision according to our own ideas.

So far as these reforms corrected real abuses, they made progress, which should be maintained. But it was human and inevitable that we would carry them too far and that terms would be imposed that were good for the seller, but hard on the customer.

Now that the buyer has the floor he will bring his pressure to bear on the just and the unjust alike.

Let the seller beware. Some of the reforms he made are good, and should be fought for against the buyer's protest. Some are not reforms at all-they are just plain "public be damned."

Terms and service need scrutiny as much as the price list, to make sure that we are ready to serve our customers as they want to be served; and not just as we want to serve them.

T

HE number of star salesmen who came back from France with war records of which their families will rightly boast for generations is large, but it is not at all surprising. There never was a successful salesman who lacked courage. Fear is sometimes defined as "the admission of inferiority." If that is true, then the thing we call fear is not fear at all unless we give in to it, and the thing we call courage is not the absence of the feeling of fear, but the ability to beat it down. "Tremble, carcass," said the great field marshal Turenne, "you'd tremble more if you knew where I am about to take you." One immense advantage possessed by the man who has conquered fear is the ability to go ahead in the business world as a salesman. A salesman's success depends largely upon selfconfidence, and self-confidence is only another name for courage. A man is afraid when he admits to himself that he is faced with a situation of which he is not master. But the man who has complete self-confidence never makes such an admission even subconsciously. He never for a moment doubts his ability to convince his customer, and so he does convince him. And it is not surprising that this courage of confidence met the test of other battles than those of business.

Most of us can be brave. When you feel timid it's comforting to remember that men of proved courage are often among those who feel fear most acutely. They feel it, but they set their wills to fight it and to conquer it. Therefore do not worry about the mere feeling of fear. Under most circumstances all that can be said of the exceptional man who never feels fear is that he is exceptionally stupid. There is no fear of physical pain, or of death, that cannot be overcome by the ordinary man who sets against his fear the love of his friends, of country, or the honor of some organization to which he belongs. It is a question of will power, and it is in childhood or very young manhood that the will is most easily trained up to the point where it can overcome fear.

Making Use of Fear

EAR of the dark is the first thing most children

his seventh or eighth year the average youngster meets fear in this form. He usually hits back by stoutly affirming to himself, if not to his friends and relatives, that he is not afraid of the dark. But fear of the dark is nothing of which to be ashamed. We all suffer it consciously or unconsciously. Many of the most successful dramatic productions make use of the dimly lighted stage to grip the emotions.

Unable to see perfectly, our nerves become tense as we guard ourselves against the shock of anticipated surprise. Our hearts beat faster and our imaginations conjure up images which frighten us. Granting the unusual plot of the piece and the skill of the actors, still no small part of the success of such a play as "The Bat," which is thrilling audiences this winter, is due to the sudden darkening of the stage at frequent intervals throughout all three acts.

The worst fears that we experience are fears of the unknown and not of the known. The schoolboy who is unable to force himself to make his first backward dive cannot force his will power to overcome the imagination of the unknown. The schoolboy who has made several backward dives and then receives a smart slap from landing flat upon the water, and is unable to force himself to make another immediately, suffers from fear of a definite physical pain. It is this sort of fear which he should use every ounce of will power to overcome.

Sooner or later every one of us comes into the grip of fear in some form. In time of war it is an expected thing. In time of peace it comes usually when we least expect it. It comes at midnight when we hear an unexpected foot on the staircase; it comes to the traveler as the brakes grind down suddenly and the train rocks and trembles to a halt;

By Philip J. Roosevelt

Illustration by Louis Fancher

it comes to the man in the automobile as the wheels skid and he feels he has lost control; it has a thousand faces and it finds a thousand opportunities. And it is always interesting to see how our friends and ourselves behave when we meet it.

For instance, consider courage in time of war. We have already spoken of how men schooled in the battles of business met the test. How about the athletes? Did these men, trained in games that require endurance and the ability to stand physical hurt, make the best records in battle? We might have thought so. But the truth is that the principal figures in sport failed, as a rule, to add to their reputations for courage. There were exceptions, to be sure, notably Eddie Rickenbacker, Hobey Baker, and John Overton. But from the ranks of majorleague professional baseball I can recall only two men who made reputations for themselves in the combat divisions in France. Of the notable football stars of recent years, many performed good service, few exceptional service. The prize ring was conspicuous in its absence on the firing line, and this was true not only of American prize fighters, but of French and English as well.

For every great athlete who increased his reputation as a brave man there were many more bank clerks, teachers, mechanics, bookkeepers, truck drivers, and others whose work in time of peace requires no visible courage or endurance, but who shone just as brilliantly under the strain of war as did those whom we might have considered our most likely and even inevitable heroes.

has never smelled powder nor seen naked steel. But after a man has trained himself to face expected danger without showing much emotion he is still not quite sure how he will act when he is surprised by danger. The other day one of the finest aviators that America produced during the war, an ace who was seriously wounded in action, told of the biggest scare he got during his service.

"We were in an airdrome near Epernay at the time," he said. "One evening after the day's work I was sitting in the barracks reading when I heard a crash directly over my head and another right outside my window. In trying to land in the half light, a Frenchman misjudged his altitude and touched his wheels on the roof of the shack we occupied. This threw his machine out of equilibrium and it crashed on its nose about twenty feet beyond. The Frenchman was not hurt. That was the worst fright I got in the war."

Physical bravery may be very common. Love, hate, and the sense of being part of a team commonly overcome fear. The normal man is usually strongwilled enough to enable his sense of duty to overcome the sense of fear even when the duty may seem to an outsider to be trifling and the danger extraordinary. That it does not take any very strong emotion to overcome the fear of death is well illustrated by the fact that the outstanding characteristic of the American soldier in the late war was not his bravery; it was his curiosity. One German officer, a prisoner, was so impressed by this American characteristic that he said, under interrogation:

"Ach, yes. I can understand the French; they think they, are fighting for their fatherland, but the Americans, lieber Gott, they fight for souvenirs!" One result of the war has been to teach us that fear is, after all, a secondary emotion. Any man can face and master the fear of death or of being maimed. Millions upon millions have done so successfully in the face of the greatest test. It might take an exceptional man not to be afraid in a funk hole under fire at 3 a. m., but it does not take an exceptional man to go on doing what he has to do in spite of the fact that he is afraid.

In civil life it is much more frequent that fear wins in the battle with courage. The politician who is afraid of his constituents and so votes against his own convictions is a familiar, pathetic figure.

Ο

The Fighting Spirit

NE story of bravery must be set down. Part of it has never been told, and, as a witness of a brave man's last fight, I tell it here.

Raoul Lufbery joined the French army because he hated Germans. He won sixteen victories in the air. He was a quiet young man from Wallingford, Conn. There are other men like that in Wallingford now, and in every town. Lufbery was not only quiet, but cautious. He told his friends he had no confidence in the type of plane assigned him, after his transfer to the American army. he said, with war flying.

He was through,

What Makes Courage

German, and we saw him fire two bursts. The German's gun spoke only once. Lufbery went down in flames; shortly before striking the ground, he stood up and jumped from the burning plane.

That is all. And yet, it shows what the average man can do; what his courage makes him do, when a stronger emotion than fear wakes inside him and gives the command. Inside all of us, heroes or cowards, there is a small voice that never sounds so faintly that we cannot hear and obey.

Next issued a frail and shabby bundle of poverty who gathered an old shawl about her and looked with terror at the night. This must be Fanny.

The minister touched his hat and mumbled: "Is this Miss Keeney?"

The fiasco of his first guess checked his ambition and he let a too-handsome man and a petulant beauty pass unchallenged. .

Then a magnificent matron of, say, fifty appeared at the door, looked up at the flutter of snow, sighed and started forward. As the minister fell back, she glanced at him casually, then paused, turned, reopened the door and called in: "Oh, John, I forgot to hang up my key. Would you mind? Thank you so much!"

The mellow voice went through the preacher like a doomsday clarion. It resounded across the years. Before he could help himself, he replied across the years: "Fanny! Fanny Keeney!"

She stood stock-still. If she had turned to look, the utter change in him would have made her skeptic, but his voice had some old cry in it that pierced her memory: "Jordan, is that you?"

"Yes, Fanny!" he groaned.

And then she had whirled and put out both her arms and seized upon and wrung his cold hands with her soft warm fingers, and peered into his face. She drew him into a better light and laughed brokenly, as the original Fanny came back with her own frivolity:

"Jordan Loomis! Is that really you? In back there behind all those whiskers!"

He laughed too, and with a recrudescence of the torment laughter had always meant for him when she compelled it from him. He groaned:

"It's me, Fanny."

It had been her very trade for years as well as her native habit to leap from one peak of emotion to its opposite without going down the valley and up the slope. So now her mockery was instantly high tragedy. She ran her keen eyes about the wreck of features once haughty with a prophet's pride; took in the crumbling of the stalwart frame she had known; saw neglected poverty in his outworn hat and overcoat. She crushed him abject with her pity for a moment, then thunderstruck him with an appalling phrase:

"My God, what has your church done to you?"

HE Reverend Dr. Loomis hung his shaggy head double disgrace. His church had indeed found him useless and had turned him out to starve or to grub for what he could pick up by what tricks an old dog could learn. But more shameful far was the fact that his church had left him helpless to protect its own awful dignity and the supernal splendors of its service from the amazement and the horror of the ungodly.

He had been uplifted by the pride of his mission. He had entered this abode of wickedness to clutch from eternal doom a poor unredeemed old woman. And here he was standing like a shamefaced beggar cringing before the pity of a great lady.

But Fanny was nourished on Shakespeare and she saw life cross-eyed; with one eye for its farce and one for its sorrow, and both blurred. There was ever a fool at Lear's elbow and at the fool's side a Lear; when Cleopatra would follow Antony to death it was a silly clown that brought her the asp.

Fanny left it for others to find the world pure despair or mere delight. If the wine were all watered, well, so the water was all wined. She was prepared for the worst and rejoiced in anything better. She had shuttled from great triumph to magnificent disaster and every degree between. She believed Charles Frohman's wise saw: "Anybody can explain a failure, but there's no explaining a success.

Life was to her a climbing of the "comic stairs." As you mounted regally you never knew when the steps would collapse and bring you back to the ground on your ear. At the worst the fall was usually good for a roar from the audience, and her last word in contempt was for the poor dolt who "could kill the laugh that goes with the comic stairs." Such a man was "a bad actor," the ultimate failure.

She had a vague recognition, however, of the pitifulness of those who are born with a stunted gift of laughter. She remembered Jordan Loomis as one of them, and she had always felt sorrier for him even than he for her, though she laughed at him and he prayed for her.

So her tears were as quick now as her chuckle.

Continued from page 7

It was good to have her youth brought back to her suddenly, but it was heartbreaking that time should have dealt so shabbily with the messenger.

After the manner of stage people, she laid her hands on the person she addressed. She terrified the old Puritan by fondling him, clutching him, standing close to him, tucking her arm into his, and holding both his hands as she led him toward the street, chattering.

"Let's get out of this dirty alley. Can't we go somewhere and have dinner together? No, I don't suppose so. I'm broke and you don't look as if you'd relish taking an actress out for a meal. Let's just walk along.'

"You're broke, Fanny?" he gasped, using her word. "But you look so-so-you look rich!"

"Costume stuff," she laughed. "When we wear our wardrobe on the street, we're on our last legs. And I'm afraid my legs aren't as good as they were. Isn't there a little park near here? I'd ask you to my lodgings, but I doubt if we'd be welcome. I'm in doubt about getting my trunk out, in fact. Unless the ghost walks to-night, and I don't think it will, I'll probably have to sit up at the railroad station pretending to wait for a train."

"Fanny! Fanny!" was all he could stammer. The opulence of her appearance had disappointed him for a moment since it robbed him of bending down to save her soul. But now that he learned of her kinship with his poverty, he was distraught.

They hobbled along the slippery walks with a

JODWIN

Pretty Fanny Keeney, with the curse of restlessness at her heart!

But

stead of the venerable cleric he should

have been, with dignities added for every year. He had planned to glorify the church, but she somehow encouraged him to be weak and to complain of his unearned humiliations.

"First you must tell me what happened? Aren't you a preacher still?"

"I'm very still," he groaned with a flicker of bravado. Sometimes he began his serious talks that way with a sly touch of humor. "I have no church, no pulpit."

"But how did you lose them? There wasn't aa scandal or anything, was there?" She would think of that first!

"A scandal in the pulpit!" he thundered.

She was not to be cowed. "Don't try to outroar Edwin Forrest, my dear. They do have scandals in your churches, you know. I read the papers, even if you don't. There are many more preachers in the penitentiary than there are actors."

"Really, Fanny, I didn't expect you to-" "Forgive me, dear!" she pleaded, pressing him back to the bench. "I ought to be ashamed of myself, but we stage people get so sick of being treated as if we were professional sinners. So much advertisement is made of the theatre's bad side, and so little of the church's, that-but, of course, you couldn't have been ousted from your pulpit. You haven't one, though, you say. So something must

have happened. Did you get too modern in your views?"

"Me modern!" he stormed. "No, I have never been tempted to stray from the path prescribed. The Word of God has always been good enough for me. I preach Christ crucified, and our redemption through the blood of the Lamb. I have never wavered or faltered."

"Then why did you lose your pulpit?"

"I was I was," he hesitated to use the long harsh word for the long harsh punishment-"I was 'superannuated.' That was twenty-five years ago-when

I was sixty, in fact."

"You mean you were retired on a pension?" "There is no pension in our church." "But your savings-you lost them, maybe, as I did mine?"

"I had no savings to lose. There wasn't any chance to save. My pay--if I may speak of money as pay, for souls have been my hire, and their salvation my recompense-the money I received never at the best reached more than eight hundred dollars a year. I couldn't even buy the books I needed to make myself a better preacher. I couldn't grow. And then, too, when I reached that peak of eight hundred dollars, I had five children to support-and later seven."

E

He sighed: "They would if they could. But-well,

you see, I had no money to give them advantages. Somehow we clothed and fed them and gave them a little cheap schooling. But two of the boys became missionaries and died of fever in Africa. One daughter is out there now among the Ibos. One daughter married a preacher, and they have a large family and only six hundred a year. One boy, poor Jesse! he became what they say a minister's son becomes: he ran away and got into disgrace and disappeared. May God bring him back at last! And that is my flock-David and Paul, missionaries, gone to their reward after carrying the Gospel into the dark places; and poor Jesse; and Martha in Africa; and Mary in a little parish in Montana; that makes five, and little Ezra and poor Ruth died as children. They would have lived if we could have taken them or sent them to a better climate, but we were established in North Dakota then, and we were unusually poor-even for us, so we lost them."

He felt Fanny's fingers stealing into his hand and thrusting between his own fingers to furnish him company in his misery. There were no words for such communion, only the wringings of hands mutely, to say: "I suffer for you, with you."

She knew what death could do to love, but she did not attempt to vaunt her wounds. She was free of jealousy.

She changed the subject slightly: "Your poor wife -tell me about her. Did I know her? Was she one of the home-town girls?"

"No, I-well, it was many years after you-after you went out of my life, before I looked upon anyone

else with-with that kind of love. Besides, I earned such pittances that I could hardly have asked anyone to share them. But at last I met Bethiah. She was not fair to the eyes of flesh, but she was good, good. I could say of her: 'Her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil. She looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. Her children arise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her!""

His voice chanted a little as it took up the sacred text, but he fell back into plain speech-and plain love:

"She comforted me in my hours of discouragement; she kept me to my prayers. When I came home heartsick after some conflict with hard-hearted men of the church, she renewed my faith in human kindliness. She carried her burden without a groan, and carried part of mine-and me.

"For nearly forty years she never missed a sermon of mine when she was strong enough to leave her bed. And once, when she was ill and too weak to be moved and the children wouldn't help her, she rose and struggled up the stairs to the attic room, to a little window, where she could look into the church and see me in the pulpit. And at last, when I was superannuated, it hurt her worse than it did me. But she never let me see her grief. For ten years of my exile she walked at my side, and then she she starved, Fanny; she died of slow starvation!

"But I thank God she died before I did. The fate of an old preacher's widowGod rescued her from that at least.

But it has been His will in His infinite wisdom that I should live on idle, useless, wretched, a cumberer of the ground.' Fanny was puzzled beyond sympathy at first. "But I should think that the older a preacher was the more venerable he was; the closer to heaven, the wiser and better he would be. In all the other professions a man of sixty is at the zenith of his career."

A little of the rebellious lava that boiled in his soul broke through. "Ah, yes, in other professions-but not in ours. I remember my last battles for a pulpit. I preached trial sermons as if I had been a beginner again, but the committees all shook their heads. I was too old. The congregations wanted new men, young voices, fashionable voices, latest doctrines, higher criticism.

pit metaphor and a Sabbath oratory, for he had his dialect as she hers: "Oh, don't think for a moment that I regret my choice. I would rather have climbed the creaky steps of my little pulpit than mounted any throne, or sat in the seats of princes, or ridden on the fiery chargers of conquerors. Other men have won fame and wealth, but I have won souls, I have dealt in eternity. I have baptized little children and set their feet on the path of righteousness, and I have sanctified marriages, and I have walked in the shadow with the dying, and I have prayed above the graves of those who have died into the everlasting life. I have eaten of bread that ye know not of. I have brought good tidings of great joy. I have had little money and much labor, but I have had God."

He was trembling like a pipe organ with the throb of his own diapason. Her only comment astounded him: "What an old-school Shakespearean actor you would have made! There's a bit of Forrest in your tone even now."

E felt as if he had been knocked down from the clouds, but he mumbled: "Who was Forrest?" "Don't you remember? He was the tragedian we fought over. Edwin Forrest. I played bits with him the last season before he retired. That would have been back in eighteen-seventy-one or two-that's it, seventy-two! For I got married that very year to my first husband."

"Your first, Fanny?"

"Poor Earl! He was a master of high comedy. He was killed in a hotel fire. We had a daughter, and she had a career too: only a short one, but brilliant."

"You let your own daughter go on the stage!" he gasped. "It's the best place I know for a woman-at least, it was then. It was the only place where she could call her soul her own at that time. Nowadays, of course, there's no end of ways for a woman to keep her independence; but then the stage was the only refuge."

He shook his head hopelessly. The paganism was too profound to argue with as yet. He simply asked: "What became of her?"

"Oh, she died-doing her duty. She caught cold on a train stalled in a blizzard, and later she wouldn't disappoint the audience. The doctor for bade her to leave the hotel, but she went on and played her part-coughing pitifully, they told me. Then-pneumonia in a little town alone. The company had to go on, of course, and leave her. The parson there refused to give her a proper funeral, so they shipped her back to me. For years I vowed to go there and burn that church over his head, but we never made that town, and in time I realized that the poor bigot knew no better. I-I almost forgave him.

"So they turned me out like an old horse to die on the road in winter. Many an old horse is better provided for than the old preacher. The horse is fed and sheltered, and he has a warm stall. And when he gets sick or is crippled, he isn't left to suffer; he is mercifully shot.

""Shall the old minister be shot?' That was the question Dr. Eckman asked once. But nobody will shoot us. We stagger along, stumbling, praying for death. Some of the churches have pension funds, forty or fifty dollars a year. That isn't much, especially these days. But the idleness hurts worst.

"The empty stomachs ache a little, but the real pain is the full hearts, the souls overflowing with zeal, stifling with smothered sermons that no one hears."

FANNY was full of wrath at such

bad management.

It's an outrage! And to think that it should have happened to you! For you had genius, Jordan. You had a voice with a soul in it, and a soul with a voice. "If you had come with me, on the stage, you would have been famous and rich; your name would have been known here and abroad. You would have thrilled multitudes, if they hadn't buried you alive! Oh, you should have been an actor!"

Bethiah had welcomed privation and obscurity in this world as the guaranty of eternal bliss in the next. When Jordan was finally thrust into the superannuated limbo, she was not surprised, and she did not protest. She was simply a little readier to die.

It startled Jordan now to find the intractable Fanny raging because the superb young giant of intellect she had fancied him to be had been yoked to the wheel like an ox or a blinded Samson and rewarded with no applause, no press notices, no big Sunday stories.

"My God, Jordan!" she cried, not noticing how he jumped with anguish every time she swore. "You were born to be a star and they've made a super of you! Six hundred a year, and there are young girls I know getting a thousand a week and a percentage, with a maid paid for, and drawing rooms when they move."

Perhaps she had unwittingly chosen the only form of consolation that could have stimulated him to a helpful reaction. He rose to a defense of penury. He could hardly speak except with pul

"But my child. Oh, dear, she was so beautiful! You should have seen her. Such a Rosalind she made! You could hardly have told her from a boy."

"She didn't-you don't mean, she she-"

"Wore tights? Oh, yes! Why not? She had God-given legs and they were meant to be used."

THE

HE preacher felt that he could not launch denunciations upon such a memory, however horrifying. He made haste to another theme:

"You spoke of a second husband." "Yes, Mr. Bashford. We were in the same company for a year on Broadway. We got married. He played heavies, old villains and misers, but he was a splendid gentleman off; kind and generous a little too generous, and trustful of the future. Then he had a stroke of paralysis. He lived for eighteen years, helpless as a baby. I had to support him. The doctors' bills were terrible. He had to have a nurse when

TH

HERE was such a plea in her tone that it was hard for Jordan to remember his cloth, or the ghost of it. He was amazed to find himself almost yearning to see Fanny act. He had denounced the theatre so often and so fervidly that he had a sudden curiosity to know what it was really like. But he had always been inclined to suspect what he wanted and to deny himself his wishes, to repress curiosity. So he faltered: "I can't, Fanny. I'm afraid I can't!"

She saw his reason, but she did not resent his refusal as an insult to her or her profession: she took it as a confession of his own weakness, and laughed and shook her head over him as over a willful child.

And this tormented him more than any anger could have done.

"All right," she sighed, and, laying her hand on his shoulder, rose with effort. "I won't compromise you further. I'm chilled through and I must have a cup of hot coffee, for I've got a performance to go through. Good-by, Jordan."

Now it was he that checked her and made her sit down again. He protested: "But, Fanny, we can't part like this. I haven't even begun to say what I want to say to you."

She smiled, but drearily: "Oh, I know. I've seen it coming. You want to talk shop, and save my soul and all that sort of thing. But it's no use, Jordan. I'm past redemption.

"The worst of it is that I'm not a bit repentant. The only things I'm ashamed of in my life are the parts I've played badly, the chances I've missed to be a greater star, and to give more pleasure to more people. I never was one of the great ones, like Mrs. Drew, Mrs. Gilbert, Annie Yeamans, or Mrs. Whiffen, or any of the grand old ladies. But I've done what I could. I've taken people's minds off their troubles. I've made them laugh and cry about other people's lives. I've educated their sympathies a little and tried to make them happier. I wish to God I could have done more of it.

"Even if I had felt that my dear theatre were the cursed place you think it is and I know it isn't; even if it were as bad as your hard-hearted slanderers pretend, that wouldn't make any difference.

"No, Jordan, you can't convert me. You won't go to my church and I won't go to yours. And there's no reason either of us should follow the other. We took different roads when we were