He was silent for a long time, but the music kept on, quaintly solemn, yet ridiculing all solemnity. She knew that he was looking at her, felt him study her face, and suddenly she became conscious of herself, of her long lashes, the delicacy of her lowered lids, veined with blue, the curves of her mouth.

"You are divinely lovely," she heard him say in a low voice, "more lovely than ever before."

She raised her eyes and met his. To meet a man's eyes, across the intimacy of a little table, where you were the more alone because surrounded by indifferent strangers, there was something in that, something that she had forgotten. "Judith," he stammered, "if you only knew- ""

She drew a long breath, then, slowly, rested her chin on her hands, smiled at him, and, raising her eyebrows interrogatively, she said: "If I only knew-what?"

"How much I love you.'

"Arthur, don't-" But faintly, like a photograph of a vivid fabric, his words, the intense, almost fierce look in his eyes, put her again into living connection with what she had lost. She had been cut off from it completely, and here at last was the only bridge, thrown across the dark flood of the past eleven months, that touched it.

Let him love her, let him tell her that he loved her again and again in the words that he whom she had loved had used.

She looked at her hand lying on the table-cloth. "Take it, take it," she implored him, though not aloud. Almost as if he had heard she felt his close over it, lightly at first. Questioningly he stroked her wrist with his thumb, until all at once he gripped it, crushed her fingers together with warm strength. And the cry in her heart was not now "Let me die," but "Come back. Come back to me through him."

In spite of herself, she felt the hard lines of her grief dissolving-dissolving— "Here are other joys!"

But that, of course, was not true. She would never respond to this at all. She would only receive it passively because it was the same thing, though only the merest shred of what she had had before and because it was the sole way to bring its memory poignantly back to her. Her friends would think that she had got over it, forgotten, as they prophesied she would, but they, as usual, didn't understand. This was different. She had proved this afternoon in the case of that woman . . .

But what had she so triumphantly proved this afternoon? She couldn't remember.

To see a winter sycamore
Against a sombre sky

Is such a tender thing for one
To mark a bleak day by:
Its delicate embroideries,
Its sprays of dotted lace
Become a veil, quite sheer enough,
For any woman's face.

A blue sky, and a sycamore-
White-barked and bare of leaf,
Can make a sorrowing heart forget
Its ancient, clinging grief;
And if upon a fragile bough
A feathered torch be lit-
No day will be quite colorless
To one remembering it.

other classes are sacrificed. "There is more to be said for democracy as a form of society," says Dean Inge, an authority not usually accounted optimistic, "than for democracy as a form of government," and as a form of government the world at large has already been converted to it. With what may be said, what, in fact, has been said for it as a form of government by our own history, securing as well as stamping through its individualism our national character, we are not altogether dissatisfied. But the individualism which tends to produce character does not gild it. And, ungilded, even character is subject to the tarnish of time. The graces of life proceed from the spirit of society. Even "escape" from "the common lot" requires co-operative aid. Moreover, character as we are apt to conceive it means integrity, quite naturally associated with the individual independence prerequisite to a self-sufficing soundness. To be happy the hermit must be good-letting who will be clever.

Fundamentally, therefore, the watchword of character with us is duty rather than development, which latter is a social criterion. Character with us connotes the constancy of principle, as in more elaborately organized societies it does the enterprise of energy. Its ideal is steadfastness, not growth, and its force is conserved rather than distributed. I speak, of course, of our familiar usage and instinctive attitude, which do not imply an inability to discriminate nuances of the kind. Expressing a hostile view, we should, for example, in spite of his protean energy, instinctively describe Byron or Napoleon as lacking character. We should indeed incline to reverse Goethe's distinction affirming that talent is best builded in seclusion, character amid the stress of the world at large. All the more do we need a larger experience of the world at large. Our experience in the greatest of world struggles ought not to intimidate us. But in the struggles of the workaday world of social development our view of character, integral as it is, and illustrated as it is so copiously and generally by individual example, is obviously a limited view. More "contacts," domestic and foreign, should be salutary as broadening both our conception of character and our

character itself-rendering them less concentrated and more social, developing them, in a word, even at the cost of some dilution.

The spirit of society, I conceive, may properly be taken to include within its scope of influence and inspiration the entire field of the relations between individuals and not merely be confined, as conventionally it is, to the sphere of social conventions. In this wider field the agencies of man's thought, feeling, and will would divide into personalities on the one hand, and their interactions on the other. It is clearly the interactions that, pursuing distinction, we ought to cultivate more actively than we do. It is they that, subjectively speaking, constitute civilization. Save in common, man can neither educate his mind, nor cultivate his sentiment, nor refine his behavior, nor produce his art. The forces that deal with these relations are the synthetic forces that compose and construct and create as plainly in the spiritual as in the natural realm, in the imaginative as in the actual; as in the matter of saints, it is their "communion" in which we are charged to believe, not the stylites among them that we are charged to emulate. It is the converging and co-operative forces, the forces of concert, that exert the cultural pressure which moulds man into mankind by modifying his habits and conforming his nature in order to fit him for a functional place in the organism they are ceaselessly building and rebuilding. To this pressure, an individualistic democracy is bound to be a little recalcitrant. We submit, but rather with reluctance than readily-though, to translate Epictetus freely, when submission is inevitable it is sensible to submit gracefully. As an English friend observed to an inquiring American anxious to know if a Duke had to go to church: "He'd better." In our case the only alternative would be, abandoning altogether the path leading to distinction, which we must seek in common, if at all, to keep on marking time as individuals. Progress in this respect and in this instance must not only be "purposive" and directed; it calls for concert, not merely enterprise and initiative, something besides and something superior to mere effort energizing inertia. We need

to achieve an organic structure, not merely maintain a united front; and a national composition, not merely "assembled and met together," but mutual.

The ideal, being definitely a social one, is beyond the competence of individualism; and distinction, being an incidental resultant of much else and itself neither a tool nor a target, individual pursuit of it might but increase the number of prigs. This side of chauvinism, what is patriotism in the community, in the individual may easily be priggishness personified. There is always the peril of the sense of superiority lying in wait for the solitary bent on outshining others—a self-regardant peril from which the objective pursuit of perfection is free. It is possible, of course, that we shall collectively fail of distinction, not because it is attainable only by the few, but because it is antipathetic to the many. The fault-if in the future any one is to be at fault at all-will be the "remnant's." If distinction cannot be made a conjoint and universal ideal, it had better be replaced. We are not going to cease being democratic because a few of us aim at being superior-the proportion of new democrats, native and naturalized, being what some of the newest might call a "progressive constant." Collectively, however, the ideal of distinction is of the simplest, though, like other ideals of manifold significance and complicated conditioning (and being itself an abstraction), difficult to state save in the abstract terms that savor of pedantry. But in this case simplicity is sufficiently shown by the fact that it has already been illustrated definitely, if with but approximate perfection, by various societies, in various epochs and in various fields, the record of which is the honor roll of history, and proves that though often costly and not always completely practicable, it has its-resplendent-practical side. Realization of ideals is rarely either easy or inexpensive, but on a scale of any importance it is always inspiring. In architecture, for instance, between five and six hundred Byzantine edifices fell to pieces in Constantinople alone, I believe, before the style was established, and the tragic catastrophe of Beauvais affirms possibilities of solid achievement though recording incidental failure.

Ideality in the practical sphere has certainly been a more wide-spread influence with us than in countries where "the man in the street" has less power and public policy is in the hands of privilege, determining it in secrecy and executing it by force. There have been compensations in the matter of distinction for our having had a secretary of state who insisted that science was humbug and poetry fact, and, in the guise of a paladin contended for the right, as acquired by purchase, of parents who agreed with him, if a majority, to impose this view on the children of those who did not. We wash our "Hebrew old clothes" as Carlyle two generations ago called such obscurantism, in blazing publicity, but perhaps they get washed as early and often and as clean as those that the most eminent of modern British prime ministers arranged to have worn a little longer when countermanding government aid to the archæological expedition that had unearthed proof of a pre-Noachian deluge. There is more than a shade of difference, too, between the cases-the suggestive difference between tutelage of the public and its pamperingwhich both political and social philosophers would estimate differently in accordance with their predilections.

In their bearing on democratic distinction, however, such cases call practically for social rather than political reflection. Just as, in the words of Mr. Arthur Colton, "Wherever good writing is general it is a social phenomenon," and, as Mr. Strunsky remarks of the new vulgarizing biography, "An adult generation ought to resent detailed proofs of the theorem that there is no Santa Claus and there are no fairies," it is parochialism not paranoia that leads the politician to debate science with the savant. What at least our own extravagances of this order evidence is not a lack of popular political sagacity or a defect inherent in democratic polity, so much as social immaturity. The factitiously mature find this particularly trying when it is brought close to them, so mysteriously unsustaining is the illusion of superiority actively shrinking from the proximity of, to use Emerson's words, "dust" to "grandeur." But the "superior" would find it particularly salutary should they do more and

think less about it. They would gain more by mixing than by aloofness. And public opinion anywhere would gain, too. Popular eccentricities of obscurantism flourished with especial luxuriance under the Russian Czars of yesterday, as during the feudal anarchy of medieval Europe. Public opinion is, to be sure, deeply affected by the institutional structure of government. We who believe in its institutionally secured, wide-spread, and inclusive dissemination, its articulateness and ultimate authority, should be the last to affirm the contrary. But public opinion is affected far more immediately by its subjection, thus secured, to the spirit of society in general. Indeed, of this spirit, rather than an effect it may properly be called a phase, through which the social spirit manifests itself in the various fields of thought and feeling. It manifests itself largely in the political field with us, because this field is with us of such preponderant proportions and such vital interest; people with us feel their responsibility about it as they do about nothing else, and more universally than anywhere else such realization of responsibility is to be found.

It is, nevertheless, to the particular stage which the evolution of the spirit of society has reached among us that is to be ascribed the level of the general mind as well as the manners which reflect it. The stage reached among the Athenians, where popular suffrage assigned the prize to Eschylus or Sophocles, as the case might be, in their competitive dramatic contests; that which made the record of its expression in the France of Louis XIV and Louis XV as presented by Voltaire an historical classic; that which in general is reflected so resplendently in the wealth of memoirs in which French literature is so unmatched abroad-and only matched at all by the plays of its own master spirit which dramatize the stuff of them; that illustrated by the Elizabethan and Restoration dramas and by the drama itself indeed in all ages and everywhere, to say nothing of, in varying degree, both history and fiction and in truth all serious literature-what are these but severally expressions of that "humanization of man in society" which is Arnold's concise, comprehensive, adequate, and serviceable defini

tion of civilization? Many times in its history have men saved mankind-from the state at Athens, from the schools at Alexandria, from paganism at the turn of the Roman Empire, from mediævalism at the Renaissance, from the Papacy at the German Reformation, from slavery at the French Revolution. This is a world of imperfections, and, needing both, every epoch and every people needs to balance the forces of individualism and those of society by curbing the excess of one and increasing the efficiency of the other, as its own case may intrinsically prescribe.

No doubt fate very considerably takes charge of the matter, and the favorite method of fate in furthering progress is, apparently, the method of advance by action and reaction-a method beside which that of the snail seems rapid and that of the crab direct. Patience is praiseworthy, but shuffling the cards is the price of it. If our individualism shows signs of having really reached its climax of utility, we cannot too much occupy ourselves with the matter of its restraint and a corresponding release of such social forces as we possess and may develop. Such signs are, I think, quite generally to be remarked by any attentive observer in our day and generation, and more and more accordingly the beneficence of the spirit of society will appear as the individualistic confusion of our social life becomes more and more apparent, and proves more and more unsatisfactory. The popularization by the "herd" of individual eccentricity gives it unedifying relief-the more so if, as at present, it is eccentricity that particularly arouses the herd's emulation. Doubtless it marks a stage of transition to greater social maturity. But all transitional trails are uncomfortable, and the sooner comparative stability of some kind or other is reached, the sooner will the freedom of "the upper air" be open to us.

In speaking of social maturity one need not, surely, be suspected of having etiquette in mind. The devotee of punctilio must end by being, like the rejected lover of the poet, ashamed through all his being "to have loved so slight a thing." Still, strictly speaking, etiquette is at worst but the pedantry of decorum, and one must admit its ancillary value, and even acknowledge that it would be a grand thing