“I have no doubt that she has acquired a certain discipline from me—from her privilege of disciplining me. She will manage her husband better because she has been able to practise on me. She has given us new ideals. ‘She never suggests an inferiority that makes her lovely.’ We can’t imagine her lovely that way. She is never a ‘sad ungathered rose.’ She isn’t gathered. Sometimes I wish she was a shade less practical; but I generally attribute this wish to the wrong pipe or a streak of ugly weather. She only reflects the spirit of the age. The other day, in a moment of curiosity, I ran into one of those highly moral restaurants that have Biblical texts on the walls, and there, under the gorgeously lettered beatitude, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ was the brutal admonition in plain black and white, ‘Keep your eye on your hat.’ Under the sign, ‘Blessed is the matchmaker,’ a man should be able to read, ‘Keep your eye on your head.’ The world knows its business, and I suppose it is a better world than it ever was before. Yet it seems as if it must be getting harder to write poetry about it. What should you say to that?” “I should say that if the world is better than it was, and that if it really is harder to write poetry about it, so much the worse for poetry. The joke isn’t on the world. I certainly do not think there is less real poetry in the world. Perhaps people live poetry more and write poetry less. Your American girls will have to look into this matter. The other day one of the magazinists discussed ‘The Passing of the Man Poet.’ Suppose this does happen, who is to celebrate the American girl as only verse can celebrate her? Are her praises only to be sung in a frowsy, pipish cave at eleven-thirty by two doting, sentimental men? Here we are sliding into the night of the century. What a collection a century of her gowns and bonnets would make!—those high-waisted, clinging things, and the ‘pokes’ she wore in the morning of the century; the slope-shouldered, balloon-skirted affairs she put on at noon; the heaped enigmas she taunted the world with in the afternoon, and the modern _décolleté_ paradox which little Tony Atwell explained in calling it a ‘coming out’ dress. We have become very plain and unpoetical, Tranton, but they are as picturesque as ever. They symbolize for us the eternal freshness, the unconquerable youth of nature. They preserve and transmit the primitive gayeties of art, the natural impulses of a younger world. The note of our raiment is _blasé_; hers gives token of an unjaded joy in the beautiful.” “Sentiment,” said Tranton, “is like a cigar. You see only the smoke by daylight, the fire at night.” “I don’t like that at all, for, by and by the cigar burns out.” “Then you light another.” “And if you do that too often you incur the smoker’s heart. Give heed to that, Tranton. Don’t tempt Providence. The day will come when your magic will wane of its power, when your ear will grow dull to the poetry of life, unless—”