Mrs. Babbitt, darning socks, speculated, “Yes, I wonder why. Of course I don’t want to fly in the face of the professors and everybody, but I do think there’s things in Shakespeare--not that I read him much, but when I was young the girls used to show me passages that weren’t, really, they weren’t at all nice.” Babbitt looked up irritably from the comic strips in the _Evening Advocate_. They composed his favorite literature and art, these illustrated chronicles in which Mr. Mutt hit Mr. Jeff with a rotten egg, and Mother corrected Father’s vulgarisms by means of a rolling-pin. With the solemn face of a devotee, breathing heavily through his open mouth, he plodded nightly through every picture, and during the rite he detested interruptions. Furthermore, he felt that on the subject of Shakespeare he wasn’t really an authority. Neither the _Advocate-Times_, the _Evening Advocate_, nor the _Bulletin of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce_ had ever had an editorial on the matter, and until one of them had spoken he found it hard to form an original opinion. But even at risk of floundering in strange bogs, he could not keep out of an open controversy. “I’ll tell you why you have to study Shakespeare and those. It’s because they’re required for college entrance, and that’s all there is to it! Personally, I don’t see myself why they stuck ’em into an up-to-date high-school system like we have in this state. Be a good deal better if you took Business English, and learned how to write an ad, or letters that would pull. But there it is, and there’s no talk, argument, or discussion about it! Trouble with you, Ted, is you always want to do something different! If you’re going to law-school--and you are!-- I never had a chance to, but I’ll see that you do--why, you’ll want to lay in all the English and Latin you can get.”