Curiously enough, children seem to act both against and in favor of these disruptive factors. It is difficult to deprive children of influence; they must part, or they must unite. They are somebody in the house; they make a noise, and it depends upon temperament whether the noise exasperates or delights. Parents are divided into those who love them, and those who bear their children; generally, men dislike little babies, unless they are rather strong men whom weakness attracts, or unless they feel pride of race, while women, excepting those who live only for light pleasures, give them a quite unreasoning affection. Children are a frequent source of trouble, for the tired man's nerves are horribly frayed by screams and exuberances. He shouts: "Stop that child howling!" and if his wife assumes a saintly air and says that "she would rather hear a child cry than a man swear," the door opens towards the club or public house. Likewise, a man who has given so many jewels that the mother of the Gracchi might be jealous, will never understand the appalling weariness that can come over the mother in the evening, when she has administered, say, twelve meals, four or eight baths, and answered several hundreds of questions varying between the existence of God and the esoterics of the steam engine. Loving the children too much to blame them, she must blame some one, and blames him. People do not confess these things, but the socio-psychologist must remember that when a man quietly picks up a flower pot and hurls it through the window, the original cause may be found in the behavior of the departmental manager six hours before. The irritation of children can envenom two lives, for it seems almost inevitable that each party should think the other spoils or tyrannizes. It is not always so, and sometimes children unite by the bond of a common love; very much more often they unite by the burden of a common responsibility. Indeed, it is this financial responsibility that draws two people close, because tied together they must swim together or sink together, until they are so concerned individually with their salvation that they think they are concerned with the salvation of the other. That bond of union is dangerous, because marriage is expensive, and because one tends to remember the time when bread was not so dear and flesh and blood so cheap. There is affluence in bachelordom; there is atrocious discomfort too, but when one thinks of the good old times, one generally forgets all except the affluence. Of the present, one sees only that one cannot take the whole family to Yellowstone; of the past, one does not see the sitting room, or the hangings on which the landlady merely blew. The wife thinks of her frocks, garlands of the sacrificial heifer, the husband of the days when he could afford to be one of the boys. And, as soon as the past grows glamorous, the present day grows dull; always because one must blame something, one blames the other. It is so much