“It is curious, old fellow,” he reflected aloud, without rising from the inchoate mass it had become--“it is curious how strange one always feels when one discovers that one has been human. But to-night you and I--_you_ and _I_ are going together to the Closerie des Lilas. May the francs in my pocket persuade our friends to be merciful!” So far as the concierge could ascertain, he was addressing a rusty, broad-brimmed black felt hat which hung shapeless from a nail on the opposite wall. Which, of course, was absurd. HOME-BREW BY GRACE SARTWELL MASON From _Saturday Evening Post_ “Of course, they’re all dears, my family,” said Alyse; “but as fiction material there is nothing to them; no drama, you know; no colour; just nice, ordinary, unimaginative dears. They’re utterly unstimulating. That’s why I can’t live at home, and create. They don’t understand it, poor dears; but what could I possibly find to write about at home?” She crushed down upon her hair, with its Russian bob, a sad-coloured hat of hand-woven stuff, and locked the door of a somewhat crumby room over the Rossetti Hand-Loom Shop, where she worked half time for a half living. A secondhand typewriter accounted for the other half; or, to be quite truthful, for a fraction of the other half. For her father, plain George Todd, helped out when the typewriter failed to provide. She then betook herself on somewhat reluctant feet to the nearest Subway. For this was her evening at home with her unstimulating family; and though she was fond of them all, her predominating feeling for them was a mixture of amusement, tender tolerance, and boredom. Moreover, they lived in Harlem, which was a deplorable wilderness, utterly lacking in atmosphere and a long, long way from the neighbourhood of the hand-loom shop. In the Subway, miraculously impelled through the bowels of the earth, Alyse--or Alice, as she had been christened--refrained from looking at the faces opposite her. The Subway does something curious to faces. It seems to drain all life out of them; it strips from them their defensive masks and exposes the deep and expressive scars of existence. A secret and hidden soul comes out in each Subway face. But Alyse averted her eyes. “Dear me,” she sighed, “how dull they are! Isn’t there any beauty left in the world?” Her father and his chum, Wally, were just ahead of her as she came up from the Subway depths. They were wending their way to their respective homes, having come up from downtown together, as was their invariable custom. Alyse gazed at their middle-aged backs without seeing anything unusual about them. Just two plodding men, getting tubby about the waist, with evening papers under their arms, walking along, not saying much. But when they reached George Todd’s door, they would look at each other, and the passer-by might well have stopped and taken off his hat, as before something rare and soul-satisfying. For here was perfect peace in friendship.