This is a question for which I can think of no sensible, logical or respectable answer. Another, to me, absolutely astounding sin of the modern parent is the fashion in which it lets its little girls and boys go to the theater, usually to matinées, regardless of what sort of thing is being performed. The Saturday matinée, apparently, has become an institution, and the child of fourteen or fifteen who is not permitted to buy a box of caramels and sit in the parquet considers himself (much more often herself) a martyr. About six months ago I went to an afternoon performance of “The Merry Widow,” simply because the whole world seemed to be talking about it and I had an erroneous idea that I ought for this reason to hear it. The music I had become sick and tired of; the book I found, by the end of the first act, to be hopelessly dull. I had paid two hard-earned dollars for my seat and I stayed to the end, to the scene at Maxim’s, which, as done in this country, is one of the most altogether nasty things I have ever sat through in a theater. I happen to have been at Maxim’s, on various occasions at every hour from seven in the evening until eight the next morning, but I have never seen there anything so common, so indecent, so beastly as the sort of debauch that took place on the stage of our local theaters. Maxim’s, as everyone knows, is a fashionable brothel, now owned by an English and American stock company. It pays dividends. But never have I discovered there anything that remotely resembled the sort of performance I saw in the Maxim act of our greatly applauded Savage’s “Merry Widow.” I mention it at all, only because sitting next to me was a girl of fourteen whom I have known ever since she was born. When the indecency was at its height, when the orgy had reached a climax, she turned to me and said with a sweet enthusiasm, “It’s awfully good, isn’t it!” Of course she had not the remotest idea of what the affair signified, but why should she have been there in the first place? Why should an American girl of fourteen be introduced to the representation of a Parisian restaurant (to put it most conservatively) represented with infinitely more coarseness than is ever found in the original? She was there because her friends, her “set,” were there. Mamma, abandoning much of her original intelligence, let her go because Muriel Smith and Gladys Jones and Dorothy Robinson always went to the matinée when they wanted to, and their mothers were all women of considerable social importance.