she had believed that demanded of her; "it troubles me to see you spending all that enthusiasm and time on what is, after all, a- grown-up toy. I want your life to count, Walter!" She was facing him now, exalted by her own high desires. "There are so many fine, big things to care about, so much that means growth! Think what they are doing for the city and for science and for the poor and the sick, the men who count! Think what there is to read and study,

w

dearest, dearest, there is so little time. How can you spend your leisure and enthusiasm over a toy?"

Walter had risen and stood with eyes on the ground, the brightness gone from his boyish face.

"The truth is, Alice," he said, after a pause, the words coming with a physical effort that made her sensitive hands clench, “the truth is, you have married the wrong man. I'm just a commonplace chap, like a million others. I have n't any vast ambitions, and I can't pump them up, - I have tried, but I can't. My ideal has been to do well by my wife and and children, to get on in my profession, and keep a decently clean record, and to have as much fun as I could on the side. To satisfy you I'd like to come higher, but I can't, honest. Now, what are we going to do about it?"

There was a new hardness in his voice, a hint of a growing intention, that made her press against a chair for steadiness. The mist seemed to gather between him and the wide, candid eyes that could see only high things.

66

But you could be so much more, Walter," she pleaded. "You have all the weapons, -courage and brains and judgment. I don't want you to be what you are not, only to use what you have. You waste yourself, dearest, undervalue your own bigness. And it is just because you have never been with people who cared for big things." She came close to him and took his arm between her hands. “Oh, can't you see how much more fun it is even, to count, to make

your

life matter in some one definite way? To belong to the world's great movement?"

He drew away from her with quiet hardness. "I am sorry, Alice, but I don't see life as a mission. I work fairly hard in my office: the rest of the time I want recreation. And we can't go on like this, you know."

"Ah, don't, don't!" Her look was that of one who faces a physical blow.

"I must. I can't stand this sort of thing another hour." He pulled out his watch, looked at it unseeingly and put it back. "I am going to do the only decent and dignified thing under the circumstances,

which is to clear out." The mist seemed to be blinding her altogether: she put out her hand as though in the dark. "To leave me!" The words were so faint that he could ignore them.

"I shall remove myself to Mrs. Pender's for a few weeks," he went on steadily. "She will understand without asking questions, and she won't misjudge you in any way. If you decide in that time that you want me as I am, if you will give up judging and love what you can in me, send me word. I will come back at any minute. Otherwise He turned abruptly to the door. "Good-by."

She shrank into a chair, looking white and stricken and crumpled. She could hear him moving about the room overhead, but she did not stir until his determined tread sounded on the stairs: then she bent forward, listening with strained intentness. She heard him put a bag down in the hall, then, after a horrible pause, his steps turned back and the door opened.

He stood over her a moment in silence.

"Alice, can't you take me just as I am?" he asked sadly. For all her terror, her eyes, lifted to him now, were as steady as his.

"It is you as you really are that I want! I can't compromise on the boy when the man is there. I want you, the big you." She caught his hand in both hers. "You can if you only will!"

"Oh, no, no!" she breathed, and read it over and over, trying not to believe. Their whole life together was at stake, and he could play amateur baseball while he waited. The agony, then, was all hers. She was utterly alone.

She spent the morning buttonholing a flannel sacque for a friend's child. One of the few violent acts of her life was to burn it, several weeks later, on sight. After a pretense of lunching, she dressed and went out into a glare of early spring sunshine. Wind was whirling the dust at the corners into flapping banners that closed round her chokingly. The world was as bald and empty as a white plate. Crowded cars went past, bearing advertisements of the charity baseball game: she tried to ignore them, but she had known all along that she must go to it. She had to see him.

She bought a reserved seat, but a glance at the crowd already installed there dismayed her: it was sure to hold friends and acquaintances. Even as she hesitated, she saw little Mrs. Pender, bright and elaborate, being helped devotedly to her place by several youths. She turned away to an uncovered stand opposite, where a crowd of another sort was cushioning the benches with newspapers, and dense clumps of little boys seemed to be chewing gum in unison. They obligingly made room for her, with a glance or two of curiosity, for welldressed, tragic-looking young women, unescorted and evidently oblivious of the fact, were not a usual sight in the bleachers. Then the teams came out, with a pretense of being very seriously in earnest, and she was forgotten.

"There he is!" she said suddenly, as the Pilgrim team spread out on the field beneath.

"Ma'am?" said the youth beside her. She sent him a dim smile of apology and bent down again, her whole hungry, lonely soul in her gaze. Walter came past talking to a comrade, a little grave and thin, perhaps, but present-minded, ready for the occasion. Presently, when the game had begun, the old boyish gayety began to show in his movements: he ran valiantly to second, and joined in the universal chuckle when he was put out on third in spite of a dramatic slide. His voice came to her once or twice, spontaneous and alert. The loneliness closed on her like a shroud.

"I am only one element of his life," she thought; then realized into what stale old paths her bitter discovery had led her, and repeated, "a woman's whole existence!" with a new and crushing understanding.

She knew nothing of baseball, and followed the game only as it concerned Walter. The crowd seemed to watch him, too: he was often applauded, generally with friendly laughter. The game was nearly over when a ball, cracking soundly on the bat, went swinging high in his direction: Walter ran back, sprang wildly into the air and caught it. A single voice shot out from the grandstand, "Good old Walter!" and the cry was repeated in a roar of applause; even the bleachers took it up in joyous familiarity, "Good old Walter!" while he stood laughing, and the attendant Pilgrims ran to pound congratulations on his back. They were all with him, laughing, stamping, cheering: all the world was with him. Only his wife seemed to sit apart in her stifling shroud of loneliness.

"I really cannot stand it," she said quietly.

"Ma'am?" repeated the youth beside

her.

She rose, and they made a path out for her, thinking by her pallor that she was ill. One or two people were already leaving the grandstand opposite, and among them she saw Mrs. Pender. Alice followed her to her carriage.

must take Walter as he is—or lose him."

"May I go home with you? May I talk with you?" She was as oblivious of greetings as a man with a bullet in his side might have been, and Mrs. Pender met her as simply. If, beneath her courtly surface, some lack of sympathy was concealed, it was gone by the time the silent drive was ended.

Alice followed her to the drawingroom with the same stricken unconsciousness of externals and sat down facing her. "I don't know what to do," she said. "I thought he would come back, that he must; but he seems to go farther and farther away. I would n't mind its killing me, - but it is not saving him. I don't know what to do."

The expression, "saving him," brought back a touch of sharpness to the withered, alert little face.

"My dear Alice!" the protest came briskly, "if Sir Galahad and Savonarola and Ralph Waldo Emerson could have been rolled into one good-looking young man, you would have made him a perfect wife. But you have married Walter. Now it is n't a matter of saving him: the question is, are you going to save your marriage?"

"But it is just that that I have been trying and waiting and suffering to save," Alice broke in eagerly. "I want it to be a big and beautiful marriage, as it must be if we take it right, if we live up to what we know is highest!"

"As it won't be but Mrs. Pender's irritation was now plainly assumed, "if you keep on driving Walter crazy with judgments and ultimatums. Girls like you," she went on more gently under the frightened look that was searching hers, "expect a man to be entirely composed of heart and intellect; but there is a good big tract of plain man in Walter, just plain boy. You have been trying to do in a few weeks something that in ten years with infinite tact and patience -you might begin to accomplish. Or say twenty years. Things are as they are, Alice, not as they ought to be. You

or

the old voice "would n't Keep things

"You mean I must compromise;" the girl's voice trembled; "keep my ideals to myself, put aside the big things to humor toys and games, — deny in my life every day what I know is the truth?” "If you had a son, dear," had grown wholly gentle, you do very much that? till he could understand them, hide your criticisms of him under your love in nine cases out of ten, hold his heart close to yours, and so guide it when you could without wounding?"

“With a child, yes; but that is n't marriage."

Mrs. Pender rose and went to her, laying her little jeweled hands on the drooping shoulders. "My dear, that is all the marriage a woman like you can have with a man like Walter. Put away your ideal of marriage as something you have missed: take him as your son, love him, help him; above all, be his comrade, - love the game because he loves it, as you would your son's. Perhaps, this way, in time he will grow nearer to the things you care about: perhaps he never will. But it is all have left. Take him in your secret heart-your very secret heart — as your oldest son; and, Alice dear,” — she bent down and kissed her with a tremulous smile,-"don't keep him an only child a minute longer than you can help!"

you

She went out of the room, and Alice sat for a long time motionless, staring ahead with wide, misty eyes; all that life meant to her pitted against the pain in her heart. Then the front door closed and a step sounded in the hall. She sprang to her feet, still irresolute, her face drawn with struggle.

"Alice!" Walter's voice was quick, warm, ready for overwhelming gladness. The shadows fled and she ran to him.

"Oh, my little boy!" she cried over and over, her arms about him. “My boy, my little boy!" He smiled, well content with her new name for him, hearing in it only her tenderness.

DEBATE as to the relative greatness in men may be said to be characteristic of our genus. We find it in the most primitive tribes, where the temporary ruler has authority because he is judged to be abler than his fellow-tribesman in those actions on which the common safety depends, as in hunting or war. As the society develops and occupations become varied and equalized to particular groups of citizens, the question as to relative greatness becomes ever more complicated, so that we now have to ask ourselves which of the successes in human endeavor is the worthiest of admiration. Is it to the soldier, the statesman, the prophet, the maker of literature, or the economist, that we shall award the foremost place in our intellectual hierarchy, when he has surpassed his fellows in these several fields of endeavor?

At first sight it may seem to be a matter of no particular importance how we rank our leaders in thought and action. They do their work: they pass on, and time alone can determine the value of their deeds. Save for the literary effect of his life Alexander has gone to the air, while the work of the unknown inventor who devised the magnifying glass penetrates the life of all civilized societies, and is to influence the fate of man to his last day. With this doubt as to the relative efficiency of our actions, why is it worth while to strive for a measure as to the merit or dignity of the men who do them ? Is it not better to accept the democracy of deeds, and to judge men alone by the sufficiency with which they perform their duty, be it spinning or leading hosts? The answer to this is that men cannot be democratic in their appreciation of their fellows; the aristocratic motive in them is primitive and fundamental. We may in

time succeed in limiting the scope of this motive; but whenever it is barred from its earlier and louder manifestations it quickly finds some other opportunity to assert itself. We get rid of the ancient aristocracy of birth to find ourselves confronted by that of wealth. We can in a way make men equal before the bar of the written law; but we cannot give them equality before that primitive obdurate aristocrat, the mind of man.

Not only is this judgment as to the essential worth of their fellows inevitable; but it is the basis of moral advancement; it is the prime ideal which is to determine whether a society is to go up or down. Each generation steers by it; those of us who would form or reforın it can do no better work than to examine into these ideals of station, and set forth their value on some profitable scale. So far such endeavors, and they have been many, have been developed on two lines. In the one it is assumed that a particular kind of work such as warfare or religion is of supreme importance, and the measure of greatness is determined by accomplishment in that field. In the other, that followed by Galton in his studies of genius, the aim is to determine the range and scope of the various forms of mental labor, to ascertain what may be termed the dynamic value of the work done by the leaders of thought and action. In this writing I propose to approach the problem from another side, to try, in a word, for a measure of this value on the scale of man's needs in the way of advancement. The plan of this may be set forth as follows:

We may assume that the mainmost purpose of man is the advance of his kind. So far as we can discern anything like purpose in this world it is to attain this