LIFE'S MINOR COLLISIONS

BY
FRANCES AND GERTRUDE WARNER

AUTHORS (RESPECTIVELY) OF “ENDICOTT AND I” AND “HOUSE OF DELIGHT”

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

TO OUR GRANDMOTHER
MARCIA JANE CHANDLER CARPENTER
WHO NEVER COLLIDES

WHY MINOR?

Collisions are measured by what they will smash. Potentially, all collisions are major. A slight blow will explode a bomb. But since most of us do not commonly carry dynamite through the busy sections of this life, we can take a good many brisk knocks and still survive.

The collisions, though dealt with in separate chapters by two of us, are seldom between two people alone. They are collisions, mostly minor, between the individual and the group, the individual and circumstances, the individual and the horse he rides on.

All the chapters are for those kindred spirits who try to be easy to live with—and find it difficult.

F. L. W.
G. C. W.

CONTENTS

NOTE

Acknowledgment of permission to reprint certain of these papers is made to the editors of The Atlantic Monthly, Education, The Ladies' Home Journal, The Outlook, Scribner's Magazine, and The Unpartizan Review.

LIFE'S MINOR COLLISIONS

LOVE'S MINOR FRICTIONS

Minor friction is the kind that produces the most showy results with the smallest outlay. You can stir up more electricity in a cat by stroking her fur the wrong way than you can by dropping her into the well. You can ruffle the dearest member of your family more by asking him twice if he is sure that he locked the back door than his political opponents could stir him with a libel. We have direct access to the state of mind of the people with whom we share household life and love. Therefore, in most homes, no matter how congenial, a certain amount of minor friction is inevitable.

Four typical causes of minor friction are questions of tempo, the brotherly reform measure, supervised telephone conversations, and tenure of parental control. These are standard group-irritants that sometimes vex the sweetest natures.

The matter of tempo, broadly considered, covers the whole process of adjustment between people of hasty and deliberate moods. It involves alertness of spiritual response, alacrity in taking hints and filling orders, timely appreciations, considerate delays, and all the other delicate retards and accelerations that are necessary if hearts are to beat as one. But it also includes such homely questions as the time for setting out for places, the time consumed in getting ready to set out, and the swiftness of our progress thither. When a man who is tardy is unequally yoked with a wife who is prompt, their family moves from point to point with an irregularity of rhythm that lends suspense to the mildest occasions.

A certain architect and his wife Sue are a case in point. Sue is always on time. If she is going to drive at four, she has her children ready at half-past three, and she stations them in the front hall, with muscles flexed, at ten minutes to four, so that the whole group may emerge from the door like food shot from guns, and meet the incoming automobile accurately at the curb. Nobody ever stops his engine for Sue. Her husband is correspondingly late. Just after they were married, the choir at their church gambled quietly on the chances—whether she would get him to church on time, or whether he would make her late. The first Sunday they came five minutes early, the second ten minutes late, and every Sunday after that, Sue came early, Prescott came late, and the choir put their money into the contribution-box. In fact, a family of this kind can solve its problem most neatly by running on independent schedules, except when they are to ride in the same automobile or on the same train. Then, there is likely to be a breeze.

But the great test of such a family's grasp of the time-element comes when they have a guest who must catch a given car, due to pass the white post at the corner at a quarter to the hour. The visit is drawing to a close, with five minutes to spare before car-time. Those members of the family who like to wait until the last moment, and take their chances of boarding the running-board on the run, continue a lively conversation with the guest. But the prompt ones, with furtive eye straying to the clock, begin to sit forward uneasily in their chairs, their