“Oh, my God, man, you wouldn’t do,” said Bruce, in droll disparagement.  “You with forty-nine bottles of pasteurized milk?  Suppose you smashed one?  Where’d you be?  Moving our family isn’t a job; it’s a science, and I’ve got my degree.”  He rose and his face softened.  “Poor girl, she mustn’t worry like that.  I’ll run in and tell her I’ll do it myself—­just to get it off her mind.”

He went to his wife.  And when he came back his dark features appeared a little more drawn.

“Poor devil,” thought Roger, “he’s scared to death—­just as I used to be myself.”

“Pretty tough on a woman, isn’t it?” Bruce muttered, smiling constrainedly.

“Did Baird say everything’s going well?” Baird was Edith’s physician.

“Yes.  He was here this afternoon, and he said he’d be back this evening.”  Bruce stopped with a queer little scowl of suspense.  “I told her I’d see to the trip with the kiddies, and it seemed to relieve her a lot.”  His eye went to a pile of documents that lay on the desk before him.  “It’ll play the very devil with business, taking three days off just now.  But I guess I can manage it somehow—­”

A muscle began to twitch on his face.  He re-lit his pipe with elaborate care and looked over at Roger confidingly: 

“Do you know what’s the matter with kids these days?  It’s the twentieth century,” he said.  “It’s a disease.  It starts in their teeth.  No modern girl can get married unless she has had her teeth straightened for years.  Our dentist’s bill, this year alone, was over eight hundred dollars.  But that isn’t all.  It gets into their young intestines, God bless ’em, and makes you pasteurize all they eat.  It gets into their nerves and tears ’em up, and your only chance to save ’em is school—­not a common school but a ‘simple’ school, tuition four hundred dollars a year.  And you hire a dancing teacher besides—­I mean a rhythm teacher—­and let ’em shake it out of their feet.  And after that you buy ’em clothes—­not fluffy clothes, but ‘simple’ clothes, the kind which always cost the most.  And then you build a simple home, in a simple place like Morristown.  The whole idea is simplicity.  If you can’t make enough to buy it, you’re lost.  If you can make enough, just barely enough, you get so excited you lose your head—­and do what I did Monday.”

The two men smiled at each other.  Roger was very fond of Bruce.

“What did you do Monday?” he asked.

“I bought that car I told you about.”

“Splendid!  Best thing in the world for you!  Tell me all about it!”

And while Bruce rapidly grew engrossed in telling of the car’s fine points, Roger pictured his son-in-law upon hot summer evenings (for Bruce spent his summers in town) forgetting his business for a time and speeding out into the country.  Then he thought of Edith and the tyranny of her motherhood, always draining her husband’s purse and keeping Edith so wrapt up in her children and their daily