Before coming to that he spoke at length of the fish lying amid cracked ice in a little box-like stand the fish merchant had built. One might have fancied my visitor also dreamed of some day becoming a fish merchant. The fish, he explained, were brought in from the sea in the evening by fishermen and the fish merchant came at daybreak to arrange his stock and all morning whenever he sold a fish he re-arranged the stock, bringing more fish from a deep box at the back of his little coop. Sometimes he stood back of his sales counter but when there were no customers about he came out and walked up and down the sidewalk and looked with pride at the fish lying amid the pieces of cracked ice. The Italian shoe-shiner and the Greek grocer stood on the sidewalk laughing at their neighbor. He was never satisfied with the display made by his wares but was always at work changing it, trying to improve it. On the shoe-shining stand sat the writer of football stories and when another customer did not come to take his place at once he lingered a moment. There was a soft smile on his lips. Sometimes when the story writer was there, sitting quietly on the shoe-shining stand, something happened at the fish-stand of which he tried to tell me. The fat old Yankee fish merchant did something--he allowed himself to be humiliated in a way that made the Greek and the Italian furious--although they never said anything about the matter. “It is like this,” the story writer began, smiling shyly at me. “You see now--well, you see the fish merchant has a daughter. She is his daughter but the American, the Yank, does not have a daughter in the same way as a Greek or an Italian. I am an American myself but I have enough memory of life in my father’s house to know that.” “In the house of an Italian or a Greek the father is king. He says--‘do this or that,’ and this or that is done. There may be grumbling behind the door. All right, let it pass! There is no grumbling in his presence. I’m talking now of the lower classes, the peasants. That’s the kind of blood I have in my veins. Oh, I admit there is a kind of brutality in it all but there is kindness and good sense in it, too. Well, the father goes out of his house to his work in the morning and for the woman in the house there is work too. She has her kids to look after. And the father--he works hard all day, he makes the living for all, he buys the food and clothes. “Does he want to come home and hear talk of the rights of women and children, all that sort of bosh? Does he want to find an American or an English feminist perhaps, enshrined in his house?” “Ha!” The story writer jumped off the bed and began again walking restlessly back and forth.