A shocking story, a sordid story, you say.  Not a bit!  They are young; they have the incomparable virtue of youthfulness.  It is naught, all that!  The point of the story is that it illustrates New York—­a New York more authentic than the spaciousness of upper Fifth Avenue or the unnatural dailiness of grand hotels.  I like it.

* * * * *

You may see that couple later in a suburban house—­a real home for the time being, with a colorable imitation of a garden all about it, and the “finest suburban railway service in the world”:  the whole being a frame and environment for the rearing of children.  I have sat at dinner in such houses, and the talk was of nothing but children; and anybody who possessed any children, or any reliable knowledge of the ways of children, was sure of a respectable hearing and warm interest.  If one said, “By the way, I think I may have a photograph of the kid in my pocket,” every eye would reply immediately:  “Out with it, man—­or woman!—­and don’t pretend you don’t always carry the photograph with you on purpose to show it off!” In such a house it is proved that children are unmatched as an exhaustless subject of conversation.  And the conversation is rendered more thrilling by the sense of partially tamed children-children fully aware of their supremacy—­prowling to and fro unseen in muddy boots and torn pinafores, and speculating in their realistic way upon the mysteriousness of adults.

“We are keen on children here,” says the youngish father, frankly.  He is altered now from the man he was when he inhabited a diminutive flat in the full swirl of New York.  His face is calmer, milder, more benevolent, and more resignedly worried.  And assuredly no one would recognize in him the youth who howled murderously at university football matches and cried with monstrous ferocity at sight of danger from the opposing colors:  “Kill him!  Kill him for me!  I can’t stand his red stockings coming up the field!” Yet it is the same man.  And this father, too, is the fruit of university education; and further, one feels that his passion for his progeny is one of the chief causes of American interest in education.  He and his like are at the root of the modern university—­not the millionaires.  In Chicago I was charmed to hear it stoutly and even challengingly maintained that the root of Chicago University was not Mr. Rockefeller, but the parents of Chicago.

Assuming that the couple have no children, there is a good chance of catching them later, splendidly miserable, in a high-class apartment-house, where the entire daily adventure of living is taken out of your hands and done for you, and you pay a heavy price in order to be deprived of one of the main interests of existence.  The apartment-house ranks in my opinion among the more pernicious influences in American life.  As an institution it is unhappily establishing itself in England, and in England it is terrible.  I