'What does matter--_now_?' I whispered at last. 'Nothin',' she answered, 'nothin' but God an' love an' doin' things for folks. That was why I had to tell you.' MR. SQUEM BY ARTHUR RUSSELL TAYLOR 'Why do we go on perpetuating an uncomfortable breed?' The man who was shaving at the mirror-paneled door of the Pullman smoking compartment looked at his questioner on the leather seat opposite. 'Give it up,' he answered. 'Why is a hen?' The first man rapped his pipe empty on the edge of a cuspidor. 'You answer the question,' he said, 'in the only possible way--by asking another.' 'Right,' answered the shaver; and began to run the hot water. A closely built man, in a suit so heavily striped as to seem stripes before it was a suit, lurched into the compartment and settled himself to his paper and cigar. 'That monkey-on-a-stick,' he presently broke out, 'is still taking good money away from the asses who go to hear him rant about God and Hell and all the rest, up in Boston. I am so _damn_ tired of him, and of that rich rough-neck Freeze. It's the limit.' 'Pretty much,' said the man with the pipe. 'I was reading about the Belgians just before you came in, and when I jumped away from them I lit on some things about Poland. Then I wondered aloud to this gentleman why we go on multiplying--increasing such an uncomfortable breed. Modoc gods and degenerate millionaires make one wonder more.' 'What is your line, may I ask?' inquired the stripe-suited man. 'Religion.' 'The hell--I beg your pardon. If you mean that you're a preacher or something like that, all I've got to say is, you're a funny one. It's your job, isn't it, to be dead sure that everything's all right, or somehow going to be all right--no matter about all the mussed-upness? Yes, that's certainly your job. Yet here you are, asking why we go on stocking the world with kids. _I_ might ask that,--I'm in rubber tires,--but not you. Yes, I might--only I don't.' The man who had been shaving had resumed his tie, collar, and coat, and now lighted a cigarette. 'I lay my money,' he said, 'on one thing: that, if men let themselves go, they wind up shortly with God--or with what would be God if there were any. You've come to it early--through the _Ledger_. You'd have got to it sooner or later, though, if you'd been talking about hunting-dogs--provided you'd have let yourselves go.' 'Well, now,' asked the closely built man, 'what is _your_ line?' 'Education.'