of approach. And that is also why men need to make an effort to understand the mind and quality, the distinctive soul and personality, that is too often left hidden beneath the pretty exterior which is all that a man has accustomed himself to look for. True collaboration between man and woman is not easy; if it were, it would not remain over as the last outstanding task of civilization. But if it is not easy, it is vastly worth while; it is the greatest single source of human happiness, and the very corner-stone of a stable human society.

Let us attempt briefly to trace the movement of this new principle of sex collaboration along the pathway of modern life. Not long ago a baby girl who had come into the world in a lyingin hospital near New York was rejected by her parents, who declared that it was a boy that they wanted and that they were sure it was a boy that had been born to them. On the threat of legal action they agreed to acknowledge the child, but what a life lies before this infant whose very cradle has been embittered by the stigma of sex inferiority! Yet the incident is only a frank revelation of a traditional and still prevalent attitude. The Greeks exposed their unwanted baby girls; we cover them with a hypocritical and condoling condescension. It seems as though our unduly concrete minds could not get over the fact that the central figure in the Christmas story which embodies for us the glory of babyhood is a bambino and not a bambina. In a truly civilized society the infant girl would rank from the first moment of her conscious being as the equal of the infant boy. Mothers

take good care to discover the suitable color and adornment for their little ones, blue for the little boy, pink for the little girl, but the care bestowed on this outward differentiation is too seldom extended to the tasks of inner understanding and harmonization.

The same condescension and neglect are to be found in the school to which the six-year-old infant proceeds. On the plea that twice two makes four for a girl just as it does for a boy, the teaching art has been blunted and standardized without reference to the needs and desires, the peculiar receptivities and characteristics of all the blossoming variety of girlhood and boyhood stiffly displayed upon the school benches. The baleful science of pedagogy, that compost of stale "tips for teachers" and of old-fashioned and wooden psychological formulæ, has degraded teaching to a dreary, undiscriminating routine, chilling to boys and girls alike, and pedantry and poor prospects combined have kept away from the teaching profession, both in Great Britain and the United States, just that family of spirits, those lovers and born teachers of human kind, who are needed in our schools if school is to supply, as it can and should, the deficiencies of the modern home.

What is needed to improve our schools for young children is no ingenious tinkering with the curriculum, no patching with this or that fashionable fad, but simply better teaching, or, in other words, teachers who are live, observant, and sensitive human beings, working under conditions in which their natural insight and love of their pupils can bear fruit; teachers to whom each child, boy or girl, AngloSaxon, Slav or Latin, Jew, Greek, or colored barbarian, is a treasure-house

to be unlocked, a riddle to be solved, a unique human soul to be loved.

At the adolescent stage, however, the plot thickens. Coeducation, far from solving the problem, intensifies it. If the needs of a little girl are different from the needs of a little boy, the needs of adolescents of the two sexes are still more difficult to harmonize. Sex begins to enter in, vivifying and energizing, yet at the same time ebullient and confusing. To ignore it, to try to keep the atmosphere "healthy" by "counter-attractions," by sport and gymnastics and even by dancing, is to bury one's head ostrichlike in the sand. Far better frankly to recognize that during these difficult years all intellectual work is pursued under an inevitable disadvantage, and that intellectual collaboration between the sexes is embarrassed by their unequal rate of growth. Coeducation carries with it, no doubt, certain "social" benefits; but it is precisely in the class-room that it is seen at its weakest, as any sincere teacher who has tried to teach mixed adolescent classes will admit. When our teachers and ministers are frank enough to acknowledge, and to draw the inevitable conclusions from, the physical facts of the adolescent period for boys and girls alike, the atmosphere of our schools will be less unreal and more edifying, and the old ceremony of confirmation may once more be worthy of a name that has been abused by many generations of flabby pastors.

The sex problem at our universities is familiar ground. Every one knows, although few will admit, that coeducation and collaboration are far from nonymous terms; that college, while

g to bring the sexes together for stimes and dissipations of idle

hours, has done little to promote that true marriage of minds for which common arrangements for study were presumably devised, and that, as has already been said, the most obvious result of the bringing together of the two sexes at college, apart from the happy exceptions who conspicuously illustrate the rule, is the persistent division between the activities of college men and college women in after life.

Here, again, the remedy is not hard to find. Smaller classes, more discriminating tuition-in a word, real teaching is the solution. The subjects of university study are the same for all, but this does not mean that their handling must be the same. Just as there is an English approach to Hellenism, and a German approach and an American approach, so also there is a man's approach and a woman's approach. Collaboration between the sexes, as between scholars of different nations, is the natural culmination of sincere and sustained study, not its inevitable accompaniment. If our existing coeducation were successful, we should witness its fruits not so much in the class-room or in the degree lists, where in any case no mature fruits are to be looked for, but in the after careers of the students and, above all, in the homes of the professors themselves. But, let it be added in passing, if the case of M. and Mme. Curie is exceptional in academic life, the fact that a low salary scale has turned the professor's wife into a domestic drudge must not be overlooked.

After school and university comes the school of life. What of the sex relationship to-day in that wider sphere? Has not the problem been solved once and for all by the passing of the nineteenth amendment? So we might be

lieve if we accepted the standards and attitudes of the conventional drawingroom and tea-table, closing our eyes and ears to the sex disturbance that surrounds us, and refusing, above all, to reflect on the record written within our own hearts and minds. How many mature men and women are there in our modern society who can look back without regret and even without shame over their own sex history, over its obscure, repressed, and embarrassed beginnings, its blind timidities and equally blind audacities, its cruel and unnecessary ordeals, its long and painful passage through the dark forest before it at length emerged, if it has emerged, into the sunlight of an integrated life? And who is there who can pass through our Broadways and Piccadillys and other centers of Christian civilization and society in night-time without being overcome by shame at the destiny to which the call of sex and the call of convention, in unholy alliance, have condemned thousands and even millions of girls and women? Here is a flaming denial to the bourgeois optimism of those who are satisfied with the externalities of the nineteenth amendment and refuse to look more closely at the inside of the cup and the platter. So long as there is a host of prostitutes on our streets to assuage the appetites of dominant masculinity and in the very homes from which their paymasters are drawn a host, equally unhappy and equally starved, of marriageable femininity pining away in the chains of a cowardly convention and cowardly self-ignorance, so long will there remain a glaring incompatibility in our outer life and a distracting incoherence in our inner natures.

These things have often been pointed out before. They have usually been met either by fatalistic acquiescence or by vague and unhelpful preachments. But it was not so that the founder of Christianity met them. He met them by analysis and understanding an analysis so frank and searching, an understanding so intimate and loving, that a lazy world has preferred to sentimentalize a situation which it needs hard thinking to understand. But He who called Himself the son of man, the typical man, was not a sentimentalist, nor even a preacher. He was a teacher and a doctor, and when he was faced with the problem of Mary Magdalene, or with her more conventional sisters, such as Martha, he knew, what the modern world has forgotten in its specialisms, that mind and body must be treated together. It is through sincere self-analysis and sincere observation, through clean thinking as the source of clean living, through the courage to set the big and the little things of life in the right perspective and proportion, to set love, for instance, above convention and happiness above riches, that modern men and women can find the way out of our present perplexities; and it is through the enlistment of courageous pioneers, men and women alike, into the army of teachers, those teachers who, despised like the British Contemptibles of 1914, are yet the crucial factor in the situation, that men and women of the coming generation, heirs of the knowledge and the self-knowledge of the ages, will at length be enabled to establish that equal and harmonious relationship that is the only enduring foundation for the good life for men and nations.

W

ONE REFLECTION

ITH his rusty, black felt hat in his hand and oblivious of passers-by, Ventrillon stooped before the shop-window until the reflection of his finely chiseled young face came into place, with the forehead of the image nicely adjusted into the crown of the hat behind the clear plate-glass. It was a magnificent hat, an elegant hat, a formidable hat, a hat which was all there was of chic, a genuine, glistening stove-pipe hat, a véritable chapeau à huit reflets, an authentic hat of eight reflections, and the Ventrillon in the glass was wearing it. The effect was amazing.

"But why should it surprise me," said Ventrillon, "when such is my present character? C'est idiot!"

For not only was this shabby young man contorting himself before the shop-window the youngest prize-winner of the spring Salon, but that afternoon he was going into society; for the t time, it is true, and into a very

curious stratum of it, but society even so. Nevertheless, though he had spent the last of the three hundred francs of his prize-money on an elegantly tailored costume of morning-coat and striped trousers, he had expected to wear the rusty, broad-brimmed black felt he held in his hand. But as he marveled at the effect of his reflection in the window, the hat before him became essential. became essential. It was the final touch, and it is the final touch which is vital.

And yet, once he appeared on the boulevards in such a hat, he would never dare to face his comrades at the Closerie des Lilas again.

They were a gay company of vagabonds: Sabrin, who worshiped Ventrillon, like a mild-eyed dog; Clo-clo, whose golden ringlets outside her head would have compensated fully for the complete emptiness inside it even if there had not been her childlike adoration of Sabrin; Pinettre from Marseilles, whose passionate tenor he had heard so often seizing upon the stars above the

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terrace of the café, r-r-rolling the r's of "Tor-rn a Sor-r-rento!"; cow-eyed, scarlet-mouthed Ginette, who always wept at Italian music; poor little Trictrac, the poet, who invariably, when drunk, recited "Le moulin de mon pays," the only poem he had ever managed to have published; Olga, the husky Russian girl, who invariably, when drunk, bussed Tric-trac resoundingly with what she called "little soul kisses"; Noiraud, the wag; Hélène, the inviolate; LePaulle, whose capital P was an affectation; Margoton, who had no taste all of them penniless, and none of them disturbed by that fact. For if one of them had the price of the beer, all drank. They had made the bomb together, ah, they had made the bomb! One would not soon forget that night when they had invaded the Cabaret of the Two Armadillos, and had driven the regular clients into the streets by thundering with full lungs:

"Elle ne fait que des trucs comme çaElle m'aime pas! Elle m'aime PAS!" pounding the tables with their beermugs to the terrific rhythm of their music; nor yet those mad evenings when they raced arm in arm down the broad pavements of the Boulevard St.-Michel, startling the bourgeois, and screaming with laughter.

He could conceal that damning morning-coat beneath his well worn imperméable, but how could one conceal a hat of eight reflections and wear it? They would think that he had become a snob, they would say that his prize had mounted to his head, they would ridicule him, they would begin to misconstrue his every statement, they would take offense; for them the hat would amount to betrayal, and

he knew that he would not be able to bear it.

But Ventrillon at that moment visualized himself entering the carved portals of a great house in the Avenue Victor Hugo, the whole effect of his newly bought elegance destroyed by the rusty black felt. It was indeed the final touch which was vital. "I am beginning to see," said Ventrillon, "that though they are undeniably amusing, they are all a little vulgar. It appears that my taste is improving in advance." in advance." But having spent the last franc of his prize-money, in the whole wide world he possessed not a single perforated sou.

He crossed the Seine to his garret in the rue Jacob, stripped off the clothes he wore, and carefully arrayed himself in the full splendor of his new garments. From the slim patent-leather shoes to the exquisitely tied cravat he was perfect. Then he went bareheaded into the streets.

When he reached the shop he hesitated not, but entered with an air of command.

"My hat has just blown off into the Seine," he explained to the first clerk in sight. "Show me the best silk hat you have in the shop; and quickly, or I shall be late for my appointment."

The clerk, after inquiring the headsize of this elegant, bareheaded youth, produced a counterpart of the hat in the window.

Ventrillon put the hat on his head and adjusted it before a mirror. "The fit is perfect," he said, "though I had hoped for a better quality. But