editorials. After graduating from a small but terrifying Western
university, he had entered the celluloid business, and as this required
only the minute measure of intelligence he brought to it, he did well
for several years--in fact until about 1911, when he began exchanging
contracts for vague agreements with the moving picture industry. The
moving picture industry had decided about 1912 to gobble him up, and at
this time he was, so to speak, delicately balanced on its tongue.
Meanwhile he was supervising manager of the Associated Mid-western Film
Materials Company, spending six months of each year in New York and the
remainder in Kansas City and St. Louis. He felt credulously that there
was a good thing coming to him--and his wife thought so, and his
daughter thought so too.

He disapproved of Gloria: she stayed out late, she never ate her meals,
she was always in a mix-up--he had irritated her once and she had used
toward him words that he had not thought were part of her vocabulary.
His wife was easier. After fifteen years of incessant guerilla warfare
he had conquered her--it was a war of muddled optimism against organized
dulness, and something in the number of "yes's" with which he could
poison a conversation had won him the victory.

"Yes-yes-yes-yes," he would say, "yes-yes-yes-yes. Let me see. That was
the summer of--let me see--ninety-one or ninety-two--Yes-yes-yes-yes----"

Fifteen years of yes's had beaten Mrs. Gilbert. Fifteen further years of
that incessant unaffirmative affirmative, accompanied by the perpetual
flicking of ash-mushrooms from thirty-two thousand cigars, had broken
her. To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married
life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first--she
listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her