Why paint these days? An insurance inspector For fires and odd risks, could in this sector Furnish more date for a compilation Than I can from this distant land and station, Unless perhaps I should have recourse to One of those firm-faced inspecting women, who Find pretty Irish girls in Chinese laundries, Up stairs, the third floor up, and have such quandaries As to how and why and whereby they got in And for what earthly reason they remain.... Alas, eheu, one question that sorely vexes The serious social folk is “just what sex is”. Though it will, of course, pass off with social science In which their mentors place such wide reliance. De Gourmont says that fifty grunts are all that will be prized Of language, by men wholly socialized, With signs as many, that shall represent ’em When thoroughly socialized printers want to print ’em. “As free of mobs as kings.”? I’d have men free of that invidious, Lurking, serpentine, amphibious and insidious Power that compels ’em To be so much alike that every dog that smells ’em, Thinks one identity is Smeared o’er the lot in equal quantities. Still we look toward the day when man, with unction, Will long only to be a _social function_, And even Zeus’ wild lightning fear to strike Lest it should fail to treat all men alike. And I can hear an old man saying: “Oh, the rub! “I see them sitting in the Harvard Club, “And rate ’em up at just so much per head, “Know what they think, and just what books they’ve read, “Till I have viewed straw hats and their habitual clothing “All the same style, same cut, with perfect loathing.” So Radway walked, quite like the other men, Out into the crepuscular half-light, now and then; Saw what the city offered, cast an eye Upon Manhattan’s gorgeous panoply, The flood of limbs upon Eighth Avenue To beat Prague, Budapesth, Vienna or Moscow,[4] Such animal invigorating carriage As nothing can restrain or much disparage.... Still he was not given up to brute enjoyment, An anxious sentiment was his employment, For memory of the first warm night still cast a haze o’er The mind of Radway, whene’er he found a pair of purple stays or Some other quaint reminder of the occasion That first made him believe in immoral suasion. A temperate man, a thin potationist, each day A silent hunter off the Great White Way, He read _The Century_ and thought it nice To be not too well known in haunts of vice— The prominent haunts, where one might recognize him, And in his daily walks duly capsize him. Thus he eschewed the bright red-walled cafés and Was never one of whom one speaks as “brazen’d”.