I'm glad of that. True or not, his views are at any rate exciting; they make life much more interesting to live. I don't know how you feel about it, and of course one's appreciations are always a matter of temperamatter of temperamental necessity, but certainly to me there is something wonderfully inspiring about the idea of changing into a quite new creature as one goes along. But then I was never properly responsive to the old doctrine of antecedent perfection - perfection which had to be regained by the shedding of accretions of 'sin.' I think it's much nicer to be positively making good than to be using up one's energy scrapping evil all the time. And if that picture of humanity as changing, growing, becoming, really takes hold of people's imaginations, there will be an end of the depressing conception which is so freely expressed in the popular metaphors used extensively in pulpits like 'separating the dross from the gold,' and 'rooting up the weeds of wickedness.' But I must n't stray into a pulpit myself, and I see I'm perilously near it. You lured me into a trap with your report of your Greenways reflections. And I'm sure you're. longing all this time to know how Billy is and what Camber and Guy's bungalow are like. As to Billy, you can feel happy he's ever so much better already. The life of idle basking that he leads down here is exactly right for him, and Morgan Crittenden's 'treatment' seems to be having an excellent effect too. Of course Billy has always had splendid powers of recuperation, only they don't often get so good a chance of working as down here. Every morning Morgan sends his car to fetch him, and generally either Guy or I go up with him to the Crittendens' house in Rye. I don't know what Guy does with himself during the time that Morgan and Billy are withdrawn for the 'treatment,' but when I go poor little Mrs. Crittenden sits in the garden with me and talks. I call her 'poor' in spite of her being strong and rich and pretty because she's cursed with a jealous temperament. I'm beginning to suspect that Morgan's sudden throwing up of his professional opportunities was really a fruitless sacrifice on the altar of the implacable god of exclusive devotion. Do ask Miss Dane if she thinks that jealousy and exclusiveness and the proprietary instinct are the miseries we shall shed with our bodies? Every time I meet them in myself or anyone else I'm almost re-converted to the doctrine of 'original sin,' creative evolution notwithstanding, for they would so certainly be it! And would n't life here on earth be heavenly. without them? It's anything but heavenly for Mrs. Crittenden - it's a place of unending torment. I'm very, very sorry for her; but I don't believe there's any cure, unless Morgan could hypnotize her or psychoanalyze her or something, and I suppose he can't, or he would have done it long ago, for his own sake as well as hers. I qualified his retreat here as 'fruitless,' but perhaps it is n't quite that. It probably does make for his wife's general peace of mind that he has practically no friends down here. He has n't very popular manners he's too silent and absent-minded; and he does n't play either golf or bridge, so the inhabitants have n't much use for him. It is n't the multitude of his acquaintances that Mrs. Crittenden fears, nor the beauty of woman - it's his real interests, his work and his sympathetically intelligent friends. I think she tolerates me because she recognizes that I'm a safe person to have about. I'm per fectly ignorant of the details of her husband's research work, and she need n't fear that he will ever want to take me off to his laboratory to see the results of experiments. I wonder if she has any suspicion that he may somehow get into touch, through those experiments, with other discarnate intelligences. That's the kind of madness which might easily attack a jealous nature that has nothing more substantial than psychical research to beat itself against. But there is one good feature about Mrs. Crittenden's exclusive attachment to her husband she does at least neglect her children. Morgan is old enough to know how to protect himself, and he must either have asked her to marry him or not refused if she asked him, so it is more or less his proper responsibility. But children are so pitifully helpless against maternal jealousy. children (two little girls, one pretty and the other plain, but both rather charming) are left to the care of their governess, who is a very normal These young woman and won't do them an ounce of harm. I don't mean that she's a nonentity, powerless for either good or evil. On the contrary, she has plenty of individuality, mostly expressed now (because she's young and healthy) in rapturous enjoyment of the delights of the sea and the sunlight. She's a mighty swimmer, and comes down to Camber every afternoon with the little girls to bathe. And she's not only teaching the children to swim, but their Uncle Guy as well! Billy's report is that she was so undisguisedly scornful when Guy confessed that he could n't that he was reduced to a meek and grateful acquiescence when she offered to instruct him. And he went into Hastings the very next day to look for a bathing garment that would n't be too hideously unbecoming. He was n't very successful. Hastings could n't supply the pure viridian or vermilion he would have liked, and he had to put up with stripes after all. Billy says he was so much ashamed of them the first day he joined the bathing party that he concealed himself in a Burberry till he reached the water's edge. But the incoming tide caressed it with such effect while he was having his lesson (the shore is so flat that the tide races in) that it had to go away in disgrace to the cleaner's next day. Now he is hardened and shameless, and saunters down with nothing more than a towel veiling his rings of red and white. He ought to be thankful they did n't introduce blue as well, since he bought the thing at Hastings, which is having such a 'gala' week to celebrate the Entente Cordiale that 'some idea of the scale of amusements provided is shown by the fact that no fewer than eight concert parties mingle their melodies along the front and in the parks,' according to the notice in The Times. Guy said he had n't heard the mangled melodies, but he had found an unhappy Frenchman and his wife in one of the trams, trying, with an immense expenditure of mental and bodily energy, to explain to the bewildered conductor that they wanted to see 'le champ de bataille,' while he could only direct them to 'the Castle.' Camber is a delightful place for a holiday after London, and it's quite particularly good, I should think, for a nervous patient like Billy. It is n't a bit the mushroom watering-place I was afraid of. It's nothing at all but a tiny settlement of bungalows and a few fishermen's cottages and a farm or so, planted at the sea edge of the great sheep-covered pasture land (still) called marsh, though it's drained dry by numberless intersecting dykes) which stretches from the edge of the Kent and Sussex hills to the sea for ever so many miles. The big, wide, green levels below, and the great, uninterrupted sweep of sky above, give one the sense of almost unlimited space and much more fresh air to breathe than is quite usual. When we grow weary of the stability of the marsh and want a change of view, we need only climb over the little ridge of sand-hills in front to find quiet yellow sands, and blue sea spreading to a very far horizon where the ships go sailing on their adventurous ways. Billy never tires of watching the shadows chase the sunlight over marsh and sea; and Rye, clustered on its low cliff, changing from the clear shining mosaic that it is in the early morning through the hot, colorless quiver of the noonday haze to an evening mystery of purple. I think he will stay here happily enough till he is quite well again. He likes being with Guy; he has entire confidence in Morgan; and he has made friends with the little girls to an extent that is really rather touching when one remembers how very little he is allowed to see of his own children. Guy is pleasantly occupied with the arts, but I was n't at all up-to-date about his models. He still admires Billy immensely, but as he quite rightly supposes he won't ever be able to equal him in his own style, he thinks of becoming a Vorticist instead. And his verse has shed any pretense of rhyme and form, and has become what does he call it? 'imagiste,' I think. He is very full of Clive Bell's book on Art, and discourses a great deal about the proper æsthetic emotions aroused by the contemplation of significant forms, and the general inferiority of the 'Christian slope' in pictorial art. 'It sounds,' Billy remarked at one point in his most recent exposition, 'very much as if it were just a matter of mathematical proportions really.' We invited him to expand his theory, and he went on: 'Well, it's a question for experimental psychologists. We might suggest it to Morgan as a life work. But I don't see why this "significant form" should n't be a perfectly ascertainable matter of definite proportions. What you have to do is just to tabulate the emotional effect in a few hundred thousand subjects of the perception of different measurably curved lines, by themselves and in combination. I grant you that the earth may be cold and dead before the combinations have a chance of being worked out, and that the immediate apprehension of the artist may be quicker but that's only another way of saying that an artist is nothing but a man with an intuitive knowledge of scientific laws.' 'Don't eliminate the magic,' I begged him. 'I don't,' he said; 'magic mostly is a matter of numbers. But you need n't be afraid about art. Pure formal patterns won't rouse much emotion, not for all Guy and Mr. Clive Bell may say. It's rather like sound the sound of words. We can amuse ourselves by pretending that the sound is what rouses emotion in us, but it is n't really, it's the sense. Tone may that's why the chanting in great dim cathedrals is so effective is n't the Latin words. But I don't believe you'd either of you get much æsthetic emotion out of reading or listening to Chinese poems, however deeply they might move an oriental admirer. You must know what the words mean, the thought they hold. It's just the same with line and color. You must know guess too hard without having to what they repre sent, before you can be really stirred. You're all wrong about representation not being essential.' 'You've given your case away with that admission about tone,' said Guy ready and anxious to defend his position. 'Why does tone affect people? Just because the vibrations of the sound waves, striking on the ear, set up internal, harmonious vibrations in the mechanism of the ear itself. In the same way color vibrations, striking on the eye He stopped because Billy was taking an unfair but excusable advantage of his condition as an invalid to turn (To be continued) Nicolas. FOREIGN FIRMS AND MEN OF STRAW [Germany feels the strain of international ostracism and fears its future effects, economical rather than social. To break the spell without the help of democracy, she has recourse to fraud, making neutral neighbors the tools of her machinations. When hostilities have been brought to a standstill, as she trusts, through hypocritical compromise, and, as she anticipates, economic warfare will have to be faced, neutral men of straw will have to be the means by which unregenerate Germany's commerce and industries may regain and, eventually, extend their coveted 'place in the sun.' The Allies, no doubt, will seek to frustrate these machinations. But how do the victimized neutrals themselves feel about this? As a rule a man can be trusted to attend to his purse. Nor does the neutral press in general, answer with an uncertain voice. One of these answers is given by the Neue Züricher Zeitung of Zurich, Switzerland, the most notable exponent of neutral opinion in the German language.—I. I. BRANTS, Lausanne, Switzerland.] FOREIGN enterprise is establishing itself in Switzerland at a rapidly increasing rate. An independent and courageous section of the Swiss press has directed the attention of the public at large to this increase, whereas other papers overflowing with 'economico-democratic' considerations, do all they can not to betray any of the factors which react upon us from abroad at present, much to the detriment of our own economic self-sufficiency. The careless or con- economic denationalization, likewise turn against those who are the willing tools of foreign influence in their own country. At present it is no longer sufficient to point out in general terms the dangers of denationalization. The cases must be presented and sifted one by one before the eyes of all, as was done in the instance of the projected weaving-mill for tulle at Wattwil. The sore point in such instances is not the transparency of the purpose for which some mammoth foreign firm establishes a branch in Switzerland. It is rather the fact that for the most part Swiss lawyers are the ones who are ready to act as men of straw in foreign attempts at masquerading. As, of late, this sad occurrence has frequently repeated itself, the Neue Züricher Zeitung is the 'voice crying in the wilderness,' where the choice must be made between the interests of personal profit and those of national economy. How high above many a Swiss jurisprudent tower the leading intellectuals of the United States of North America, who in these hard times have placed themselves at the disposal of the State, and who, to fulfill the letter of the law which permits only salaried officials, have applied for an annual wage of one dollar! How unutterably grander than our materialism, corroding even the more liberal professions, the spirit of those Americans proves to be very ones whom our snap-judgment pigeon-holed as calculating business men! With respect to the question at issue nothing can save us but a general return to the conviction that it is dishonorable for the sake of private gain to support the attempts of foreign enterprise which must inevitably lead our future economic existence into the most fatal adventures. the Since our authorities have allowed themselves to be convinced that the above-mentioned events call for official supervision, there is indeed reason to hope that in private circles likewise there will be more zeal in the defense of our commercial and industrial integrity. Hence, the complaisance toward requests for charters for foreign firms shown even by an official institution like the Zurich Register of Commerce remains inexplicable. One need not find fault with this bureau for not detecting all the knavish tricks of every applicant. It might not know, for instance, that an Austrian boot-firm had a hand in a new enterprise bearing the good Swiss name of 'Sentis' and sporting the three original confederates for a living trade-mark. Still less could it be expected to know this, as the aim of the enterprise was so loosely defined as to imply everything or nothing, just as one pleases. But it is unpardonable that the Register at present should still occasionally accept and approve designations such as 'Swiss Hardware Factory' (Schweizerische Metallwarenfabrik), when the foreign character of the firm is notorious. We had not expected this to be still possible after all that has been said and written about spurious titles of firms. Here we have a right to inquire whether such indulgence is practised with the knowledge and consent of the controlling officers. Expressions like 'Swiss' in the names of firms which cannot claim a right to any such qualification, have been prohibited by order of the Federal Council. And we do not mean to put up with a persistent silence or a half answer, when publicly asking the reason why these provisions, born from the stress of the hour, are still ignored in isolated instances. We cannot remain indifferent when the first arms, forged at last by the |