revival of mock modesty inspired by the dying efforts of the old formulated religious thought.  And then——­ when steam had had its day, impressing its materialism upon the world; making what should be hard, easy, and what should be easy, hard—­came electricity—­a new science almost approaching a spiritual force, and, with a rush, the telephone that made the commonplace bristle with romance!  The curve of sulphitism arose.  A wave of Oriental thought lifted many to a curious idealism—­and, as so many other centuries had done before, there came to the nineteenth a fin de siecle glow that lifted up the curve still higher.  The Renaissance of thought came—­came the cult of simplicity and Mission furniture—­corsets were abandoned—­the automobile freed us from the earth—­the Yellow Book began, Mrs. Eddy appeared, radium was discovered and appendicitis flourished.

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So there are bromidic vegetables like cabbage, and sulphitic ones like garlic.  The distinction, once understood, applies to almost everything thinkable.  There are bromidic titles to books and stories, and titles sulphitic.  “The Something of Somebody” is, at present, the commonest bromidic form.  Once, as in “The Courting of Dinah Shadd” and “The Damnation of Theron Ware,” such a title was sulphitic, but one cannot pick up a magazine, nowayears, without coming across “The ——­ of ——­” As most magazines are edited for Middle Western Bromides, such titles are inevitable.  I know of one, with a million circulation, which accepted a story with the sulphitic title, “Thin Ice,” and changed it to the bromidic words, “Because Other Girls were Free.”  One of O. Henry’s first successful stories, and perhaps his best humorous tale, had its title so changed from “Cupid a la carte,” to “A Guthrie Wooing.”

This is one of the few exceptions to the rule that a sulphitic thing can become bromidic.  Time alone can accomplish this effect.  Literature itself is either bromidic or sulphitic.  The dime novel and melodrama, with hackneyed situations, once provocative, are so easily nitro-bromidic that they become sulphitic in burlesque and parody.

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Metaphysically, Sulphitism is easily explained by the theory of Absolute Age.  We have all seen children who seem to be, mentally, with greater possibility of growth than their parents.  We see persons who understand without experience.  It is as if they had lived before.  It is as if they had a definite Absolute Age.  We recognize and feel sympathetic with those of our caste—­with those of the same age, not in years, but in wisdom.  Now the standard of spiritual insight is the person of a thousand years of age.  He knows the relative Importance of Things.  And it might be said, then, that Bromides are individuals of less than five hundred years; Sulphites, those who are over that age.  In some dim future incarnation, perhaps, the Bromide will leap into sulphitic apprehension of existence.  It is the person who is Absolutely Young who says, “Alas, I never had a youth—­I don’t understand what it is to be young!” and he who is Absolutely Old remarks, blithely, “Oh, dear, I can’t seem to grow up at all!” One is a Bromide and the other a Sulphite—­and this explanation illuminates the paradox.