- a little wheedling, a little flattery, and they would nobly sacrifice themselves to their own inclinations by marrying the beggar girl, my King Cophetuas. A conceited man need not be a bad husband, and he would always be easy to manage."

VI

A week later and the lake was wildly tossing its wind-raised waves; the rain stalked the hills in gigantic spectral columns, and the air that had been so warm was icy-cold.

Lamp and fire burned brightly within the little house under the lee of the hill, and Leven, with a richly-colored pipe in his mouth, sat deeply absorbed in some odd scraps of paper. Their miscellaneous character, and their condition, written on both sides, spoke eloquently of the shifts of Teddy to get the simplest material on which to set down his bursting thought. What Leven had inspected so far showed brain certainly. The poems and ideas were mostly in Latin or in classical English; they would have been creditable as the work of a sixth-form boy in a public school, and were clever as the work of a mostly self-taught child of fourteen, but they displayed no genius.

Retford had been wandering up and down restlessly.

"I say, Leven," he said, after four or five attempts to break into speech. "She's an extremely clever girl, you know, and when all is said against her that can be said

"Umph?"

"I mean about her station in life and all that, you have to remember that brains tell, and a woman, clever and charming, easily reaches up to her husband's station. These Westmoreland people have good blood in their veins, too. It isn't her looks that attract me so much as her discrimination. She is so perceptive; she knows a fool when she sees one-and-er- a man who isn't a fool too, you know. Some people are so dense, it would kill me to live with them."

"Eh? Who is it you are talking of?"

"Jessie Sinclair. But I'm only rotting, I couldn't really do it. My mother would have a word to say. No. I must see her again, of course, and soothe down any little feeling I may unintentionally have aroused."

"I fancy it will depend on her," said Leven half to himself.

"What? Well, you obviously don't want me, so I think I'll just go down to the hotel. What a night!"

When, with a good deal of fuss and stamping, he had got into his mackintosh and departed, Leven resumed his reading. The last thing he got hold of was the best. Most unpromising choice of material one would have thought. It was a poem in English blank verse, telling the story of Er the son of Armenius, taken from the tenth book of Plato's Republic. In some mysterious way the boy had caught the glow of Plato's high thought. With many a mark of the tool he had labored, but the inspiration shone through, and there was something that came and went that made Leven's breath come faster. He had found his mark of genius, the girl was right! How on earth had she known? The boy was crude and undeveloped, obviously limited by his disadvantages, but he was a boy with a mind which could fly to any height.

Leven let the paper fall on his knee, and sat on looking into the coal fire necessary on this cold northern August evening. Teddy should be his grand opportunity. In Teddy he would see developed all those dreams with which he had started life. He had meant to write poetry; he had meant to be a great classical scholar; and in the fine mind of the child he saw the creative power he had lacked.

And he, Leven, who sat there, began to feel that at last he should do some great thing for another. Blindly he sat, unconscious that his way through life was already marked by "great" things. Never a fellow-creature had appealed to him in vain; never one had been helped without the resources of a finely sensitive soul being taxed that the gift of help might be delivered without hurt to the self-respect of the recipient.

His pathway behind was radiant with light, but he knew it not. He looked onward, and saw only the light that he should kindle for himself by the discovery of Teddy.

Meantime, in an upstairs room at the hotel-inn, Retford was face to face with Jessie. It was a small room, overfilled with worn furniture. It was occasionally let as a "private sitting-room" to visitors in the summer, and was used by the family in the winter. Everything in it had a discolored look. The cheap piano piled with dog-eared torn music, the damp walls plastered with cheap pictures in cheaper frames, and china ornaments set upon plush

"plaques." It was a room where, if you moved at all, you had also to move some piece of furniture to make way.

At the table sat Jessie with a soiled account-book before her. She had been adding up the columns before Retford came in at the door, and, shutting it behind him, sat down on a chair close to her. He had asked for her, and when her father offered to fetch her, and he had suggested going up himself to find her, he had decided his fate in life.

"I wish you hadn't come," said Jessie, her face bent low over her figures, "but now you are here you might help me with these accounts; the total comes different every time."

Instead of that, he leaned nearer to her, across the creased red rep cloth. "Why do you say you wish I hadn't come, Jessie?" "You know." The words were so low that he had to lean nearer yet.

"Perhaps I can guess. You think that I shall soon go away, eh?"

No answer.

"Tell me, Jessie, would you be very sad if I went away?" "Of course not," with a defiant shake of the head. "I wouldn't. I should think then you were just like all the rest." "And you don't think so now?"

For answer she looked up at him under her lashes for one glinting moment, but it was enough, Retford was a doomed man. And what would you say if you knew I had come here tonight to ask you to be my wife?"

Never had he felt so deliciously magnanimous, so grand and noble as then!

"Yes?" He was holding her now in his arms.

"That you were different from any man I had ever known.' "My darling! You are fit to be the wife of a king."

Then you are my king," she said, turning to him.

When he heard the news, Leven puzzled long whether this would be accounted to him for righteousness or not, and then gave it up in despair and fell back upon his undoubted "find" of Teddy.

HOMES, in ultra-modern Rus

ARTHUR RUHL

I

Na story which deeply moved the fiction readers of a generation ago, the hero, pausing on the doorstep of the lady to whom he had just offered his hand, gazed down the long line of gas-lamps which led to that far-off bourne where dwelt the "other woman." If he had but twenty-four hours longer to live, would he choose to spend them with her or with the Bishop's daughter? With her, -if but that brief

sia, bave met the fate of a number of other "bourgeois notions," and palatial chambers in Moscow bave been chopped up into tiny compartments to make room for the crowds of people who have been thronging into the city since 1917. Cobblers, professors, and quondam nobles are bere pictured trying desperately to keep the home fires burning while using a common latchkey and stumbling over each others' umbrellas in quarters packed tight by vigilant housing committees. time were left. A life-time was another matter. We were not led to believe that this other lady was in any wise reprehensible. It was scarcely in the rôle of Mr. Davis' heroes to know any such. She lived "at the other end of the gas-lamps," and that was enough. The geography of New York, with wealth and fashion gathered about its central avenue and the cross streets leading down a descending social scale, invites such symbolism. Its sharp visualization of social differences strikes us all from time to time. On

some wilting summer night, as we stroll past shuttered palaces whose owners are inviting their souls somewhere by the sea, an "L" train, blinking across the street to the eastward, suddenly recalls the sweating herds in the tenements over there trying to sleep..

Why — but the speculation stops before we are ready to take any strange birds into our little five-room nest! In Moscow the Fifth Avenue pedestrian's midsummer fancy has been carried to the logical and bitter end. So many people, so many square feet of floor space. Divide the one by the other, at whichever end of the gas-lamps they live, and there you are.

One begins, naturally, with the palaces. They become hospitals or schools, or, if they are interesting enough, museums. In 1900, a casual visitor to Petrograd would not have been likely to see the inside of the Stroganov Palace on the Nevski. Last summer I

paid a few cents admission and strolled with the rest amidst Rubenses and Van Dycks, Gobelins made in Russia in the eighteenth century, and crystal lustres of the time of Catherine II, fine and delicate, like ladies' necklaces. On hot summer mornings, in Moscow, I used to wake up to gaze on the cool browns and greens of smoky old seventeenth century Flemish paintings, for the members of the A. R. A. were privileged persons. The amateur of art who used to own the house still lived there, — in a little room near the kitchen. When the A. R. A. left, the house became a museum again.

In the beginning, as everybody knows, houses and lots were nationalized. Ownership still rests with the State, but with the gradual retreat toward a modified form of capitalism there has been a tendency to permit former owners to resume partial occupancy of their premises. Management of the house is in the hands of a house-committee elected by the tenants from among their number. To this committee the lodgers pay a certain sum in the nature of rent which is applied to repairs and upkeep. For water and electric light the tenants pay the State-controlled companies just as they used to pay private ones.

Much depends on the house-committee. Subject to the decrees of higher authorities, they virtually run the house. A "good" committee can make things easy. Assume, for instance, that all the persons registered as living in your apartment are there, although actually some of them may be living somewhere else. A "bad" committee can make life insufferable: take one of your three precious rooms while friends of theirs in the five-room flat downstairs are left undisturbed, — and so on. Even when former owners have contrived to remain in their houses, they generally live in the less attractive rooms, and more often than not, for safety's sake and to avoid doorkeepers' fees, the main entrances of big apartment houses have been closed and one picks one's way in through the court and up what used to be the dark servants' stairs.

To be concrete, let us observe for a moment how this business of equalizing living conditions works out in the average middleclass family. This particular family, old friends of mine, consists of a widowed mother and a grown son and daughter. The father, a small Government official, died just as the war was beginning