with perspiration. And all the time that we raced about and yelled my conscience clawed unmercifully and I seemed to hear Mother and Gilly and Grandmother's horrified protests, "Children-stop this minute. It's a crazy thing you're doing!" I knew in a way that it was crazy and dangerous and wrong and wicked, but I didn't care. And in another way I felt exactly like a martyras Perry had explained it. We were going to die, perhaps, for Gilly. And anyway if Father married Miss Nevins I didn't want to live. So we tore around in the sun until Perry said, "Stop-come on nowquietly."

We followed him into the house through the laundry door, through the cool gloom of the lower halls into the kitchen. The maids were upstairs resting and it was very quiet indeed. We tiptoed through the empty kitchen with its big checked floor of blue and white, and opened the door softly into the store-room, into a smell of parsley and potatoes and tomatoes and flour and soap. Then Perry knelt on the floor and opened the door of the big ice-box, and kneeling there in our absurd garments we took out bowl after bowl of food and ranged them on the floor-cold beets and spinach and ham and potato and some wine jelly on too flat a plate that shivered itself off into Nancy's lap.

"Now, k-k-k-kids," Perry whispered, "Nancy and I'll get in first. You sh-shut the door and keep it shut until I knock. Th-th-that ought to give us colds if anything can. Curl your legs up, Nancy. G-g-gosh can't you stand anything? Don't snivel Jean; it's the only way.

Think of Horatius. Th-th-think of the Christian martyrs. Now when I bang-open. Go ahead."

I knocked over all the shelves we had taken out of the ice-box as I shut the door. I felt hideously guilty and frightened, and it seemed as if slow hours passed and still Perry did not bang. Tommy was calmly sampling the cold contents of each bowl upon the floor, with one rabbit's ear lopped over his sticky face. Could Perry and Nancy have smothered in the box? I opened the door and implored them to come out but Perry said:

"Sh-sh-sh-shut it, you idiot." So I banged it shut. Then heavy footsteps sounded in the kitchen and I grabbed Tommy by his long rabbit ears and hauled him into a corner beneath some shelves. The door opened and the vast checked form of Sarah the cook entered and stopped, viewing the array of cold viands on the floor. And at that moment Perry banged on the icebox door. Sarah jerked it open shouting:

"Come out o' there, ye young divils. Dhirtyin' up me clane icebox. Ye'll catch yer death er cold. Look at Nancy now, Look at Nancy now, she's green as the spinach. Don't ye be fallin' into the puff-paste, ye bad boy ye.”

Then howls from Nancy, and Perry protesting, “Qu-qu-quit that, you hurt me." And the voice of cook rose in an angry crescendo until the other maids came hurrying in to see the fray. Then Tommy and I were discovered and dragged out into the arena, and there was a tumult of upbraidings and howlings; and we were marched up the back stairs to the dining-room, a woebe

gone and shivering Turk and princess and two weeping rabbits, into the furious presence of Father who had been entertaining people on the terrace at tea. I don't know what would have happened to us if in the midst of his anger Nancy had not turned faint and gone so very green and wobbly that we were all frightened.

"My heavens, she's going to be sick now because of your crazy actions!" Father roared. "Go to bed all of you, and don't any of you come out of your rooms for a week. Mother, what in heaven's name can I do?"

"If I were you, Merril I should—” But we didn't hear the rest of what Grandmother said for the waitress was shooing us up to bed.

236

Sometime around midnight I awoke with a sense of disaster; and as I roused to full consciousness I realized that the house was full of noises and hurrying and unaccustomed lights. I slipped on my red wrapper and ran into Nancy's room and found myself in the midst of a bout of croup. Grandmother in a wistaria silk kimono, and Father frantic in his striped bath-robe were hanging over Nancy's crib. And poor Nancy was choking, gasping and coughing in a most terrifying way. Then Perry came in the door in his pajamas with his hair standing on end.

"I-I-I-I-I have a dreadful e-eearache," he stammered.

Then chaos fell upon us for nobody knew how to do anything. The room seemed to fill with frightened disheveled people.

"Sure the only thing that'll save Nancy is a good dose er kerosene,"

some one said-and it was the cook standing in the doorway wrapped in a pink quilt. Father turned on her and shouted above Nancy's gaspings: "Do you want to kill the child! Get out of here-quick-telephone the doctor somebody."

Then Miss Nevins, very lovely in a sort of rainbow negligée came in. "Oh, the poor kiddie," she saidand stood nervously in the doorway.

"Why doesn't somebody do something," Father cried. "Don't any of you fool women know what to do?" "Shure Miss Gillfillen puts an umbrella up," the waitress said.

"An umbrella," Father cried. "You're all crazy. What good would an umbrella do-"

"She puts ipecac in a kettle I think-" I said.

"Yes, and gives the child benzoin." But fortunately nobody paid any attention to those fatal suggestions.

"My ear aches terribly," Perry began to weep. "It-it-it ought to be irrigated.”

"Here, you take care of Perry, Gloria," Father said. "Do something to his ear-quick."

"But I don't know what to do," Miss Nevins protested, and went over to Father and smoothed his arm. "Now he mustn't get so all worried. Kiddies will be kiddies and get these little upsets you know."

But he jerked his arm away from her and said: "The child's going to die unless we do something. Can't you get the doctor on the telephone? Gloria-for heaven's sake don't you know anything?"

"Oh," she screamed, and put her hands over her eyes. "I can't bear it I can't stay-I couldn't bear to see

the room.

Then Perry sobbed and rushed into his room with such a face of despair as I have never seen on any one, and I went after him and tried to pull his head out of his pillow where he cried.

"W-w-w-w-we did it. We k-k-kkilled her, sh-sh-she's so little to g-g-g-go out alone. It sh-sh-should be me," he sobbed. And there was a fear and a presence of death that seemed to brood over the turmoil of the house.

"Don't cry," I said. "PerryPerry, Mother will meet her. Mother will take care of her-don't cry so.'

Then we heard a horn, a car driving up to the front door, and the cook was calling, "It's Miss Gilly, the blessed Saints brought her." And it was Gilly. Father had telegraphed her the day before-and here she was running upstairs in her blue serge suit and her green scarf. She didn't waste a minute on questions. She stripped off her coat, rushed in the bathroom, washed her hands and came out putting on her white Red Cross apron. Then the chaos calmed before her. Nancy had a dose of ipecac at once. Towels were picked up, beds straightened— the ipecac worked and Nancy's horrible gaspings were soothed.

"Stop crying, Perry," Gilly said, and he stopped, and the waitress and I were competently set to work at him with ear equipment—and all was well. Then at last Perry was quiet and Nancy drowsing off with the croup kettle sending up purring aromatic fumes from beside her bed.

it was nearly dawn and birds were singing with a clamorous racket outside. But Perry seemed to be crying again so I went to him.

"G-g-g-get Gilly," he said, "I-I-I-I was nearly a-m-m-m-murderer, I-II-I-I've got to confess."

So I slipped on my wrapper and stole downstairs, for I had heard her voice speaking softly in the dining

room.

There was a curious feeling through the house, an unreality, a hush and tenseness as I crept downstairs. And there in the dining-room was Father still in his bath-robe, his head on his arms on the table-crying! There was a cup of coffee beside him, and Gilly was standing by him trying to give him some him some toast. With one hand he was clinging to Gilly's hand even as we clung to her in our troubles, and he was saying:

"I didn't know how much I loved you till you went. W-w-w-will you forgive me?"

"Of course."

"But will you marry me?"

"If you really want me," and she smoothed his hair as if he had been Perry or Tom.

Then I turned and scurried quietly upstairs, but I felt as if I had dozens of birthday candles lighted inside me.

"Dont disturb them to confess now," I said, bursting into Perry's room. And he sat up in bed and I told him.

"W-w-well the 'kiddies' won out," he said. “B-b-but I f-f-feel simply steeped in s-s-sin.”

I

NTEGRITY is one of the introspective virtues. It has less reference to society than to yourself. We try to achieve it among men, but we should need it even in solitude.

It is the art of being wholly one's self, of being an integer in life. We begin to feel the need of it somewhere in middle age when one or two moods come over us, or perhaps both at once-when we feel we have missed something in life, or when we feel that we are "put upon," as we say, that life is imposing upon us habits and duties not ours. Then we turn our thoughts to a vision of wholeness, a state in which we might be just ourselves, nothing less and nothing more. For the first time, perhaps, we realize what those ancient Greeks were talking about when they spoke of moderation. The measure they had in mind was their own personality; nothing in excess meant to them nothing below what they were capable of and entitled to, and nothing beyond.

It is not surprising that before we can understand this virtue, we need experience of life. Perhaps we cannot see the value of being ourselves until we have labored to be tactful, to practise humor, and to have taste. After some years of sincere ambition to give our fellows their due, to

respect the idiosyncrasy of the other man, and to avoid rubbing down to a smooth mediocrity the interesting peculiarities of the world about us, we begin to take some interest in our own special traits. Perhaps we too, we begin to think, deserve respect, at least from ourselves. Our faults and weaknesses should be cured, certainly; but those aspirations and gifts which we are convinced are our distinguishing marks, should not be maimed nor diminished. From youth to age, we should progress through life complete.

When we say integrity, we usually have in mind honesty of some sort, reliability, trustworthiness. But though these meanings attach themselves to the word, they are secondary. The kind of honor which integrity first implies, is a godlike self-sufficiency. Man is one world, and has another to attend him, says the old poet. When we cultivate integrity we begin by dreaming of a world within us which shall have all the rest of life as attendant and servant. Honesty, in the financial sense, of course follows; we will not take what does not belong to us and we will return to every other man what does belong to him. We shall wish to encourage integrity in others as well as in ourselves. But this kind

of honesty is a small affair, a negative matter, compared with the completeness of soul which the word hints at. A negative matter, that is, because if you were to teach honesty from the outside in a series of rules for rendering each man his due, or in a series of admonitions when and where not to steal what belongs to another, though you might produce a superficial character, none of us would consider the result in the best sense honorable nor illustrative of integrity. The virtue is properly acquired from a central source within. Once we have determined to be altogether ourselves, and nothing more than ourselves, a precise honesty in small matters is an inevitable consequence.

Critics of modern society often say that integrity is become a rare virtue. They are quite right. But when they imply that the lessening of interest in this virtue is recent, they forget history. The Greek formula of moderation, the golden mean, the nothing in excess, remained an ideal for Western conduct through the Middle Ages, as it has been an ideal for centuries in the Orient. Indeed, the ambition to be nothing but one's self has always distinguished Eastern thought, rather than Western. It haunts all those departments of Oriental literature with which the West is familiar-the more poetical stories in the Arabian Nights, the finest tales in the Old Testament, the glimpses of Persia which the Greek historians reported. It confronts us again in what the West is learning of China and Japan. If the ideal now seems to us a little strange, and we say therefore that it is leaving our Western civilization,

we should remember that it began to depart during the period which we call vaguely the Renaissance. One characteristic of Western thought at that time was an emphasis on the first half of integrity, and a complete exclusion of the second half. The enormous enthusiasm of a reawakened Europe stressed the possibilities of infinite development in each individual. Man's one fear seemed to be that some of his talents might not be used, and apparently he had confidence that all talents were latent within him. Since the whole of life was his inheritance, happiness, he thought, could lie only in the consciousness of having grown to his utmost stature. A poet like Marlowe spoke for his age when he gave us in Tamberlane the portrait of a man who sought unbounded power, and whose only failure was that old age stopped him before he had achieved all the dominion he aspired to. Marlowe spoke for his age still more when he portrayed the thirst for knowledge in Faustus-for all sorts of knowledge, for all the kinds of power which knowledge is said to be. But Marlowe was But Marlowe was so lyrical, so rhapsodic, that the casual modern reader may judge him not typical of his age-typical rather of youth, perhaps, and of the high spirits which precede experience. Yet Milton, many years later, in his early maturity, set down a program of education for average youth which presupposes the same ideal. He was willing, he said, to call only that a complete and generous education which fitted a man to perform all the offices, public and private, of peace and war.

and war. In other words, he considered a man educated only if he