accepted standard, one that is laid down for age, sex and social station. There are people to whom convention is truly almost holy, and true to our principle of variability, there are others who hate convention. Because many writers have shot shafts of satire and ridicule at convention and custom, and because of the enormous reading public, the artificial nature of convention has been emphasized to that large part of the community that desires to be different merely for the sake of being different, and there is built up a conventional unconventionality. It has become the mark of the artist, the great in spirit, to be unconventional (at least in novels), and so there are a hundred "unconventional" poseurs to one genuinely free in spirit. Anything that becomes a dogma or a cult is not unconventional, for it is the standard or the custom of a group. Most Bohemians, so-called, are poseurs and conventionalized to their marrow. And most of the really unconventional are "freaks," "odd sticks" whose grotesque individualities cannot conform. But in the mass of the unconventional one finds here and there, like nuggets of gold in sand, the true reformers of the world. The "poseurs" in custom have their analogies in the pompous, over-dignified and over-important; the affected, in a word. Affectation is felt to be a disharmony between the pose and the inner values or an attempt to win superiority or "difference" of a superior kind by acting. In either case it excites ridicule, hatred or disgust, and shafts at it form part of the stock in trade of the satirist, humorist and indeed every portrayer of life. What men demand of each other is sincerity, and even where the insincerity is merely a habitual pose it arouses hostile feeling which expresses itself all the way from criticism to the overt act.