nature of clothing, would be abolished. Men and women would go about the streets looking like Greek gods and goddesses, and those who didn't look like that would either asphyxiate themselves in shame, or go into training. No young woman who had her pick of young men resembling the Discobolus would ever think of mating with adipose tissue. Childbirth would be a pleasure. What would happen to marriage is uncertain; but it would probably be modified in the direction of chastity.

The folly of romance would disappear from the world. Or would it? A young man with the right measurements would meet a young woman with the right measurements-and-and, well, first they would compare measurements, and then discuss gravely the question of whether they were perfectly mated from a eugenic point of view, and then the young woman would ask him if she might have the honour and pleasure of being the mother of his children. It would be noble and exalted and wise; nothing of prudishness on the one hand, nor of recklessness on the other. They would be as chaste a pair as ever yet in love's embraces met. Their nuptials would be celebrated gloriously under the open sky, not en route to Niagara Falls. Their children would be strong and beautiful. They would probably never cast a-a eugenic eye on anybody else; and if they did, they would part friends, after a calm, sane discussion.

In their world there would be no pain of hopeless love or love deferred; no torment of jealousy, no agony of heartbreak, no insane cycle of hopeless, useless memories. These things would be unworthy of a young woman with the arm, bust, and thigh measurements of a Greek statue. She would take a walking-trip, or engage in a swimming-contest, and be herself again. No "nerves" in a physicalculture world!

Not that the young woman whose picture and measurements appear in the magazine has things figured out just that way. Her intentions perhaps extend little further than making her fiancé stop smoking cigarettes and bringing up her daughter in an uncorseted and high-heelless way. But there are others who have the thing all worked out in their minds. They find in the right development of the body a cure for all maladies of the soul. Bestiality, perversion, insanity, jealousy, commercialized vice -all these are to disappear at the touch of physical culture. Standing erect (a thing you and I do not know how to do), breathing deep, with the proper food in their stomachs, their nerve-cells unpolluted by caffeine, nicotine, or alcohol, with their pores open and their kidneys just right, they front the world with a magnificent and quaint confidence.

1915

VI. Talking in Bed

T

HE other day, as a piece of literary penance, I forced myself to read a chapter of that very dull old novel, "Vanity Fair"; and in it I found this passage:

"It seems like yesterday, don't it, John?" said Mrs. Sedley to her husband; and that night in a conversation which took place in a front room on the second floor, in a sort of tent, hung round with chintz of a rich and fantastic India pattern, and doublé with calico of a tender rose-colour; in the interior of which species of marquee was a feather-bed, on which were two pillows, on which were two round red faces, one in a laced nightcap, and one in a simple cotton one, ending in a tassel:-in a curtain lecture, I say, Mrs. Sedley took her husband to task.

Note the extreme caution with which Mr. Thackeray approached the subject. Mrs. Sedley and her husband were in "a front room on the second floor," by which you are to understand a bedroom; they were in "a sort of tent," by which you are to understand the old-fashioned curtained bed. A delicate subject! Mr. Thackeray did not regain his

composure until he had come to the nightcaps. Once there, he is fairly safe, for a nightcap is comic, and no well-regulated reader could possibly be stirred to improper feelings by thinking of a nightcap. And when he came to the phrase curtain lecture, the day was saved for Mr. Thackeray. Under cover of that current and respectable phrase, he could go on and tell the conversation which Mr. and Mrs. Sedley, aged fifty-odd, had that night in bed.

The phrase curtain lecture has vanished with the curtained bed. And with the nightcap, that saving touch of comedy, has vanished all reference in fiction to the fact that people do talk in bed.

The bed itself remains in fiction, but as a purely erotic adjunct. It is rather a pity. The bed is in reality a much more versatile piece of furniture than fiction gives it credit for. It is used for all sorts of pleasant purposes-for reading, for eating breakfast in, even for sleeping. But one of the most delightful uses of the bed is for talking in.

Judging from the few references to talking in bed which have crept into fiction, one would gather that a man and his wife refrained from talking in bed until they became forty and funny, and that then their conversation consisted in her scolding him-the "curtain lecture." Perhaps that was true in Mr. Thackeray's time, but it is not true in our own. Any well-married young couple will tell you that the

bed is the scene of the pleasantest conversations in the world.

For busy people the day is so full of other things that it is not until bedtime that they really have time to talk their hearts out. Work, play, dressing, dinner, and sociability take up the hours. And during that time a hundred ideas, observations, comments, stories, are stored away by each one for the other's benefit. A glance exchanged at dinner means "Did you see that? Yes-we'll talk about it later." In the evening, their friends come in; but do they say everything that is in their minds in the presence of their friends, or do their friends say everything in their presence? By no means-something is put off till later. The heart and soul of every gathering is in the aftermath-a couple in this bed and a couple in that bed, and not wearing nightcaps either; remembering, commenting, criticizing, judging, laughing, talking-talking, talking.

If any novelist had it in his heart to give a real picture of a happy marriage, he would tell about some of these conversations in bed. They would be well worth the telling, for the subject is a charming one. It is unnecessary to emphasize the presence of the girl-it is obvious that if it is agreeable to talk to any girl under any circumstances, it is one of the chief boons of this dusty life to talk to the nicest girl in the world in bed. Perhaps her voice comes mysdark at your side; perhaps the

teriously out of the