Every American city has also what Don Marquis calls its “little group of serious thinkers”—­women, most of them—­possessed of an ardent desire to “keep abreast of the times.”  These women belong to clubs and literary societies which are more serious than war.  They are always reading papers or attending lectures, and at these lectures they get a strange assortment of “cultural” information and misinformation, delivered with ghastly assurance by heterogeneous gentlemen in cutaway coats, who go about and spout for pay.  If you meet these ladies, and they suspect you of being infested by the germs of “culture,” they will open fire on you with a “thought,” about which you may detect a curious ghostly fragrance, as of Alfred Noyes’s lecture, last week, or of “the New Republic” or the “Literary Digest.”  The most “liberal” of them may even take “The Masses,” precisely as people rather like them used to take “The Philistine,” a generation or two ago.  Among the members of this group are the women who work violently for suffrage—­something in which I personally believe, but which, merely because I believe in it, I do not necessarily like to take in my coffee as a substitute for sugar, on my bread as a substitute for butter, and in my ear as a substitute for pleasant general conversation.

I do not wish to seem to speak disparagingly of women of this type, for they are doing good, and they will do more good when they have become more accustomed to possessing minds.  Having but recently discovered their minds, they are playing with them enthusiastically, like children who have just discovered their new toys on Christmas morning.  It is delightful to watch them.  It is diverting to have them pop ideas at you with that bright-eyed, efficient, assertive look which seems to say:  “See!  I am a liberal woman—­a woman of the new type.  I meet men on their own ground.  Do you wish to talk of birth control, social hygiene, and sex attraction?  Or shall we reverse the order?  Or shall I show you how much I know about Brieux, and household economics, and Ellen Key, and eugenics, and George Meredith, and post-impressionism, and “Roberts’ Rules of Order,” and theosophy, and conditions in the Sixteenth Ward?”

When one thinks of these city groups, and of mail-order houses, and Fords, one may begin to fear it is indeed true that we are becoming standardized, but when one lets one’s mind drift over the country as the eye drifts over a map; when one thinks of the quantities of modest, thoughtful, gentle, generous, intelligent, sound American families which are to be found in every city and every town, and thinks again, in a twinkling, of sheriffs and mining-camp policemen in the Far West, of boys going to Harvard, and other boys going to the University of Kansas, others to the old Southern universities, so rich in tradition, and still others to Annapolis or West Point; when one thinks of the snow glittering on the Rocky Mountain wall, back of Denver; of sleepy little towns drowsing in the sun