convention and order, fascinated him as apparently nothing else could.
He insisted that they were enough. A man did not need a great house
unless he was a public character with official duties.

"Dreiser," he would say in Philadelphia and Newark, if not before, "it's
in just such a neighborhood as this that some day I'm going to live. I'm
going to have my little _frau_, my seven children, my chickens, dog,
cat, canary, best German style, my garden, my birdbox, my pipe; and
Sundays, by God, I'll march 'em all off to church, wife and seven kids,
as regular as clockwork, shined shoes, pigtails and all, and I'll lead
the procession."

"Yes, yes," I said. "You talk."

"Well, wait and see. Nothing in this world means so much to me as the
good old orderly home stuff. One ought to live and die in a family. It's
the right way. I'm cutting up now, sowing my wild oats, but that's
nothing. I'm just getting ready to eventually settle down and live, just
as I tell you, and be an ideal orderly citizen. It's the only way. It's
the way nature intends us to do. All this early kid stuff is passing, a
sorting-out process. We get over it. Every fellow does, or ought to be
able to, if he's worth anything, find some one woman that he can live
with and stick by her. That makes the world that you and I like to live
in, and you know it. There's a psychic call in all of us to it, I think.
It's the genius of our civilization, to marry one woman and settle down.
And when I do, no more of this all-night stuff with this, that and the
other lady. I'll be a model husband and father, sure as you're standing
there. Don't you think I won't. Smile if you want to--it's so. I'll have
my garden. I'll be friendly with my neighbors. You can come over then
and help us put the kids to bed."