I think the old style was the best, because when young people quarreled they didn’t need an ambulance and a hospital surgeon to help them make up.

In the old days Oscar Dobson would draw the stove brush cheerfully across his dog-skin shoes and rush with eager feet to see Lena Jones, the girl he wished to make the wife of his bosom.

“Darling!” Oscar would say, “I am sure to the bad for love of you.  Pipe the downcast droop in this eye of mine and notice the way my heart is bubbling over like a bottle of sarsaparilla on a hot day!  Be mine, Lena! be mine!”

Then Lena would giggle.  Not once, but seven giggles, something like those used in a spasm.

Then she would reply, “No, Oscar; it cannot be.  Fate wills it otherwise.”

Then Oscar would bite his finger nails, pick his hat up out of the coal-scuttle and say to Lena, “False one!  You love Conrad, the floorwalker in the butcher shop.  Curses on Conrad, and see what you have missed, Lena.  I have tickets for a swell chowder party next Tuesday.  Ah! farewell forever!”

Then Oscar would walk out and hunt up one of those places that Carrie Nation missed in the shuffle and there, with one arm glued tight around the bar rail, he would fasten his system to a jag which would last for a week.

Despair would grab him and he’d be Oscar with the souse thing for sure.

When he would recover strength enough to walk down town without attracting the attention of the other side of the street, he would call on Lena and say, “Lena, forgive me for what I done, but love is blind—­and, besides, I mixed my drinks.  Lena, I was on the downward path and I nearly went to hell.”

Then Lena would say, “Why, Oscar, I saw you and your bundle when you fell in the well, but I didn’t know it was as deep as you mention.”

Then they would kiss and make up, and the wedding bells would ring just as soon as Oscar’s salary grew large enough to tease a pocketbook.

But these days the idea is altogether different.

Children are hardly out of the cradle before they are arrested for butting into the speed limit with a smoke wagon.

Even when they go courting they have to play to the gallery.

Nowadays Gonsalvo H. Puffenlotz walks into the parlor to see Miss Imogene Cordelia Hoffbrew.

“Wie gehts, Imogene!” says Gonsalvo.

“Simlich!” says Imogene, standing at right angles near the piano because she thinks she is a Gibson girl.

“Imogene, dearest,” Gonsalvo continues; “I called on your papa in Wall Street yesterday to find out how much money you have, but he refused to name the sum, therefore you have untold wealth!”

Gonsalvo pauses to let the Parisian clock on the mantle tick, tick, tick!

He is making the bluff of his life you see, and he has to do even that on tick.

Besides, this furnishes the local color.