The morning after their return, as soon as Peter had gone downtown, Flossie tore down the big photograph from the wall and flung it into the garbage can.
I noticed its absence some days later, when I went over to see them, and asked with a little apprehension, “What did Peter say when he found it gone?”
The strangest expression came into her face. She said in a low tone, “He has never even missed it.” And then she began to cry. As I looked at her, I saw that she had suddenly begun to show her age.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND
The thoughtful intellectual people around the fire were talking with animation and conviction, and I hoped the one business-man present, a relative of mine, was appreciating his privileges. It was not often that you could collect before your fire so many brilliant people representing so many important varieties of human activity; and when you had collected them it was not often that the talk fell on a subject big enough to draw out of each one his most hotly held conviction.
The subject was big enough in all conscience: nothing more or less than what is the matter with the world in general and with our country in particular. They all had different ideas about what the trouble is and about the best cure for it. The head nurse of the big City Hospital had started the ball rolling by some of her usual scornful remarks about the idiocy with which most people run their physical lives, and the super-idiocy, as she put it, “which makes them think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.”
“We’ll never have any health as a nation till we have health as individuals,” she said. “See that the babies have clean milk; give the children plenty of space and time for out-door play; keep the young folks busy with athletic sports; run down all the diphtheria carriers and make it a misdemeanor not to be both vaccinated for small-pox and inoculated against typhoid ... and we’d be a nation such as the world never saw before.”
The political reformer was sincerely shocked by the narrowness of her views, and took her down in a long description of our villainously mismanaged government. “Much good mere physical health would do against our insane tolerance of such political ineptness and corruption!” he ended. “What we need is an awakening to the importance of government as every man’s personal business.”