Winny fell on her knees in a rapture. "Oh, Miss Holland!" she cried, "don't you love him?”

Jane admitted that she rather liked him. "She's a wretch," said Sophy. "Baby duckums, she says she rather likes you."

Baby chuckled as if he appreciated the absurdity of Jane's moderation.

"Oh, don't you want," said Winny"don't you want to kiss his little feet? Would n't you love to have him for your very own?"

"No, Winny; I should n't know what to do with him."

"Would n't you?" said Mrs. Heron.

"Feel," said Winny, "how soft he is. He's got teeny, teeny hairs, like down, golden down, just there, on his little back."

Jane stooped and stroked the golden down. And at the touch of the child's body, a fine pain ran from her finger-tips to her heart, and she drew back, as one who feels for the first time the touch of life, terrible and tender.

"Oh, Jane," said Sophy, "what are you made of?"

"I wonder-” said Mrs. Heron.

Jane knew that the eyes of the two women were on her, searching her, and that Sophy's eyes were not altogether kind. She continued in her impassivity, smiling a provoking and inscrutable smile.

She looks as if she knew a great deal," said Sophy; "and she does n't know, Baby dear-she does n't know anything at all."

"Wait till she 's got babies of her own," said Mrs. Heron; "then she 'll know." "I know now," said Jane, calmly.

"Not you," said Sophy, almost fiercely, as she carried the little thing away to his bed beside her own. Winny and the nurse followed her. Jane was alone with Frances Heron.

"They-they'd press up so close to me that I should see nothing-not even them."

'Don't you want them to press?” "It does n't matter what I want. It's what I see. And they would n't let me

see."

"They 'd make you feel," said Frances. "Feel? I should think they would. I should feel them, I should feel for them, I should feel nothing else besides."

"But," persisted Frances, "you would feel."

"Do you think I don't?" said Jane. "Well, there are some things-I don't see how you can-without experience."

"Experience? Experience is no good ---the experience you mean— -if you 're an artist. It spoils you. It ties you hand and foot. It perverts you, twists you, blinds you to everything but yourself and it. I know women-artists-who have never got over their experience, women who'll never do anything again because of it."

"Then, my dear," said Frances, "you would say that geniuses would do very much better not to marry?" Her voice was sweet, but there was a light of swordplay in her eyes.

"I do say it-if they 're thinking of their genius."

"Would you say it to Hugh?" The thrust flashed sharp and straight. "Why not?" said Jane, lightly parrying the thrust.

Sophy appeared again at that moment, and she said good-by. They held her at parting with a gaze that still searched her and found her impenetrable. Their very embrace dismissed her, and disapproved.

Tanqueray was waiting for her at the gate. He was going to see her home, he said. He wanted to talk to her. They

Baker Street.

your sort. No good can come of your being mixed up with them. Why do you do these things?" he persisted.

"They 're kind to me," she pleaded. "Kind? Queer sort of kindness, when you 're working yourself to death for that fellow and his magazine."

"I'm not. He'll let me off any day. He said he 'd rather his magazine smashed than I did."

"And you believed him?"

"I believed him."

"Then," said Tanqueray, "it's more serious than I thought."

His eyes rested on her, their terrible lucidity softened by some veil. "Do you like him, Jinny?" he said. "Do I like him? Yes." "Why do you like him?"

"I think, perhaps, because he 's good."
"That 's how he has you, is it?"
He paused.

"Brodrick does n't know you, Jinny, as I know you."

"That's it," she said. "I wonder if you do."

"I think I do. Better, perhaps, in some ways, than you know yourself."

He was silent for a little time. The sound of his slow feet on the gravel measured the moments of his thought.

"Jinny," he said at last, "I 'm going to talk truth to you"-Again he paused"because I don't think anybody else will. There are things," he said, "that are necessary to women like Mrs. Levine and Mrs. Heron that are not necessary to you. You have moments when your need of these things is such that you think life is n't worth living unless you get them. Those moments are bound to come, because you 're human. But they pass. They pass. Especially if you don't attend to them. The real, permanent, indestructi

one.

ble thing in you is the need, the craving, the impulse to create Hamblebys. It can't pass. You know that. What you won't admit is that you 're mistaking the temporary, passing impulse for a permanent No woman will tell you that it's temporary. They'll all take the sentimental view of it, as you do. Because, Jinny, the devilish thing about it is that, when this folly falls upon a woman, she thinks it's a divine folly." He looked at her again with the penetrating eyes that saw everything. "It may be," he said"it may be; but the chances are it is n't." "Tanks," she said, "you 're very hard

on me."

"That 's just what I'm not. I'm tenderer to you than you are yourself." It was hard to take in, that idea of his tenderness to her. "Think-think, before you 're drawn in."

"I am thinking," she said.
Tanqueray's voice insisted.

"It 's easy

to get in; but it is n't so jolly easy to get out."

"And if I don't want to get out?" she murmured.

He looked at her and smiled reluctantly, as if compelled by what he saw in her.

"It's your confounded Jinniness!"

At last he had acknowledged it, her quality. He revolted against it as a thing more provoking, more incorrigible than mere womanhood.

"It'll always tug you one way, and your genius another. I 'm only asking you which is likely to be stronger?"

"Do I know, George? Do you know?" "I 've told you," he said, "I think I do."

Three weeks later he heard that Jane was engaged to Hugh Brodrick. Before the end of the autumn they were married.

ON

NE evening a dozen years ago, a group of earnest men sat about a table in the study of Abram S. Hewitt, formerly Mayor of New York. They were discussing a plan to found in New York a new center of popular education, separate and singular, but gathering to its support scholar and toiler, college and labor-union-in short, the honest opinion of honest men in every grade of life. Its purpose was the shaping of a sane, informed public opinion upon which to build safely our civic structure, and of paving the way to the common understanding without which the republic is a phrase and brotherhood an idle dream. That was the vision unfolded to them by Charles Sprague Smith, the youngest of them all. They listened closely, and asked thoughtful questions. Dr. Rainsford was there, St. Clair McKelway, and Richard Watson Gilder. Mr. Gompers and two of his lieutenants were eager listeners. There were conservatives and radicals, and one of the former shook his head when Mr. Smith spoke of the social unrest and the bitterness that lay at the root of it.

"You are playing with fire," he said. "Then let us so play with it," was the spirited reply, "that we shall get heat out of it, not conflagration."

His enthusiasm won them over, and the People's Institute was launched. As the head of the governing body of the

civic ideals, would need to create immediately.

Yet, strong as is the impression it has made upon the community, if one conceives of it as an institution in the sense in which Cooper Institute is an institution, he will get only a feeble grasp upon the thing that has grown up in a brief time, and has sown its seed broadcast until we hear of it sprouting on the Pacific shore and as far off as the city of Jerusalem. "To furnish the people continued and ordered education in social science" and kindred subjects was, indeed, its declared purpose at the outset, but in the very next sentence of its platform these subjects were defined as "such as time and the demands shall determine." The subjects which "time and the demands" have thrust upon the attention of this forum of the people, and with which it is now grappling, virtually reflect the growth of public spirit in America's greatest city in the last decade, and illustrate its political history, though in truth the work of the Institute is in no sense political.

Starting out in a year of civic defeat and discouragement with a series of lectures presenting, with easy application to present problems, a comparative study of democracy in its historic aspects, the Institute has developed into an evening school in social science whose classes are always full; a people's forum that summons to its bar officials of State and city to give account of their stewardship, and whose summons is heeded; and a people's church where every honest belief may claim a hearing, the one test being sincerity. If he be found lacking in that, the speaker will have cause to regret that he ever ventured into that pulpit, for in this "people's church" the congregation talks back, and to some purpose. Further than this, the Institute fosters a system of civic clubs that are a natural and wholesome outgrowth of its activities, and has obtained a hold on the people's amusements which has thrust upon it a more than local censorship of their most recent and characteristic phase, the moving-picture show. As if these things were not enough, it is at this moment backing an effort to revise our marine laws in the interest of public safety, while a scheme of mercantile cooperation to eclipse all previous attempts in that field, and at last reduce the cost of

living, stirs its vaulting ambitions. However it may be with this last, the experience of the past has fairly classed all the rest among "practical politics."

The manner of development of this unique structure is instanced by the case of the civic clubs. They were not planned, though in the nature of things they were bound to come, or all the toil and effort would have been vain. Like Topsy, they "growed," but out of the most unlikely of things-a knot of young people busy with amateur theatricals. Their ambition did not stoop to comedy. "Julius Cæsar" was their goal, and in drilling them their volunteer leader took occasion to pillory New York politics beside the kind that troubled ancient Rome. They were interested from the start, and before the night of the play arrived, a bigger thought had taken hold of the players. Scarce had Mark Antony laid the ghost of the noblest Roman of them all when a body of American patriots, full panoplied for the fray, sprang from his ashes, proclaiming itself a club. It has been at work five years now, and from the impulse that gave it birth-the incident of the play was just the spark that set it off-have sprung a score like it that draw their inspiration from the nightly meetings in the Cooper Union, and find their work in the dirty streets and in the crowded tenements where most of the members live. A Federate Civic Council, made up of delegates from them all, lends strength and stability to the organization.

Last winter the difficulty of finding meeting room riveted their attention upon a situation of great gravity. There is virtually no opportunity in the tenementhouse districts for the people to get together except in the back room of a saloon or in some hall controlled by the saloon element. Hence came the gangs of the past, and gang politics, in which the saloon played its ominous part. It was this condition that the settlements came upon twenty years ago, and which made of them, first of all, club-houses for the young. young. To-day, with the ever-increasing crowding in the homes of the poor, and with more than twelve thousand young men growing into voters every year, the situation is, if anything, worse than it was then. All the while the finest opportunity in all the world is going to waste, with our great school-houses standing closed to the