"Yes, it is," he assured me with his formidable quiet certainty. "Yes, it is. It goes beyond anything we can imagine. It's the greatest force in the world, this desire, this absolute necessity to be in the style. Nothing else can stand up against it for a moment, not hunger, not fear, not love, not religion. They only exist so far as they don't get in the way of being in the style. The minute they interfere with that, over they go like a pack of cards in a tornado! What do you think a man is doing when he works all his life for his family? Is he earning their livings? Not much. He's enabling them to keep in style, and if he doesn't he is a failure. What do you really want for your children? That they may grow up to develop all the best they have in them ... yes, _if_ that doesn't prevent their being in style." I found all this so outrageous that I could only stare a silent protest. "I don't mean just my small part of it, hats," he explained, "although hats are always, so to speak, the crest of the tidal wave. It's everything. Style rules everything. Of course all material things, furniture, clothes, the way houses are built and gardens laid out and parks made and pictures painted. Everybody can _see_ with his own eyes how _they_ are all determined by whatever the style happens to be in that century or year, and not by anything we want or need. But more than that, too. Everything goes together. We talk and eat and act according to the kind of furniture we have; for instance, when rough-hewn Morris furniture was the rage and we all had to have it or dry up and blow away with envy, don't you remember how the athletic blowsy styles in clothes and manners came in too, and it was all the thing to go to a funeral in a striped shirt and yellow shoes and the girls' shirtwaists bloused over in front as though they had forgotten to tuck them in, and how bulging pompadours straggled down in every woman's eyes?" "Do you mean," I was ready to laugh at him, "that you think that our Morris furniture influenced us so deeply as all that? Even Morris would be surprised to hear so much claimed for it." He was scornful of my incapacity to grasp the scope of his idea. "No, Lord no! The Morris furniture hadn't anything more to do with it than a tree bent double with the storm has to do with making the wind blow. I mean that the same thing that _made_ us mortgage our souls to have Morris furniture just then, made us also talk slang and wear yellow shoes to funerals." "Well, what _did_ make us?" I challenged him. He answered monosyllabically, solemnly, with his redoubtable, arresting conviction, "The style did." We were both silent a moment as if in the presence of Niagara or the ocean. Then I said, in a feebler challenge, "Well, what _is_ 'the style'?" He professed the admirable ignorance of a wise man in the face of mystery.