coat in blue chinchilla which Emmeline explained would be just the thing for cool nights in the country. She had bought it in despair at obtaining the kind of crêpe de Chine she wanted. The crêpe de Chine came in a smaller box.

At breakfast the next day we were tremendously cheerful. I told Emmeline of the handsome raincoat I had bought in preparation for lying on my back on the grass and looking up at the clouds. From that we passed to the new Brieux play. But when Emmeline intimated that she was going downtown soon after breakfast, I grew anxious.

"Do you think," I said, "that it will really make any difference to Mr. Galsworthy whether you read him in a voile or in a white cotton ratine?"

"If that is the way you feel about it," said Emmeline, "I can telephone and have them take all these things back. I hate them anyhow."

"What I mean is," I said, "that you don't want to wear yourself out completely before we leave the city. We have a month's reading ahead of us. Let us begin it in peace of mind."

"With nothing to wear?" she said.

Tulle is a partly transparent material, which in the hands of a skilful milliner becomes an invaluable aid to a thorough comprehension of the plays of M. Brieux, especially when studied amid the complexities of life on Maple View Farm. As usual, it is the department stores which have been first to discover this fundamental connection in life. They have everything necessary for the thorough enjoyment of Mr. Bryce's book on South America—blouses, toques, parasols, and tennis shoes. Special bargains in linen crash and batiste are offered on the same day with a cut-rate edition of "Damaged Goods." Reading Brieux in the country is almost as complicated a diversion as lying on one's back and looking up at the clouds.

IV

NOCTURNE

Once every three months, with fair regularity, she was brought into the Night Court, found guilty, and fined. She came in between eleven o'clock and midnight, when the traffic of the court is as its heaviest, and it would be an hour, perhaps, before she was called to the bar. When her turn came she would rise from her seat at one end of the prisoners' bench and confront the magistrate.

Her eyes did not reach to the level of the magistrate's desk. A policeman in citizens' clothes would mount the witness stand, take oath with a seriousness of mien which was surprising, in view of the frequency with which he was called upon to repeat the formula, and testify in an illiterate drone to a definite infraction of the law of the State, committed in his presence and with his encouragement. While he spoke the magistrate would look at the ceiling. When she was called upon to answer she defended herself with an obvious lie or two, while the magistrate looked over her head. He would then condemn her to pay the sum of ten dollars to the State and let her go.

She came to look forward to her visits at the Night Court.

The Night Court is no longer a centre of general interest. During the first few months after it was established, two or three years ago, it was one of the great sights of a great city. For the newspapers it was a rich source of human-interest stories. It replaced Chinatown in its appeal to visitors from out of town. It stirred even the languid pulses of the native inhabitant with its offerings of something new in the way of "life." The sociologists, sincere and amateur, crowded the benches and took notes.

To-day the novelty is worn off. The newspapers long ago abandoned the Night Court, clergymen go to it rarely for their texts, and the tango has taken its place. But the sociologists and the casual visitor have not disappeared. Serious people, anxious for an immediate vision of the pity of life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. No session of the court is without its little group of social investigators, among whom the women are in the majority. Many of them are young women, exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely gowned, and very well taken care of.

As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting her turn before the magistrate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance over the railing that separated her from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic young women in the audience. She observed with extraordinary admiration and delight those charming faces softened in pity, the graceful bearing, the admirably constructed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of dress, which she compared with the best that the windows in Sixth Avenue could show. She was amazed to find such gowns actually being worn instead of remaining as an unattainable ideal on smiling lay figures in the shop windows.

Occupants of the prisoners' bench are not supposed to stare at the spectators. She had to steal a glance now and then. Her visits to the Night Court had become so much a matter of routine that she would venture a peep over the railing while the case immediately preceding her own was being tried. Once or twice she was surprised by the clerk who called her name. She stood up mechanically and faced the magistrate as Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted the witness stand.

She had no grudge against Officer Smith. She did not visualise him either as a person or as a part of a system. He was merely an incident of her trade. She had neither the training nor the imagination to look behind Officer Smith and see a communal policy which has not the power to suppress, nor the courage to acknowledge, nor the skill to regulate, and so contents itself with sending out full-fed policemen in civilian clothes to work up the evidence that defends society against her kind through the imposition of a ten-dollar fine.

To some of the women on the visitors' benches the cruelty of the process came home: this business of setting a two-hundred-pound policeman in citizens' clothes, backed up by magistrates, clerks, court criers, interpreters, and court attendants, to worrying a ten-dollar fine out of a half-grown woman under an enormous imitation ostrich plume. The professional sociologists were chiefly interested in the money cost of this process to the taxpayer, and they took notes on the proportion of first offenders. Yet the Night Court is a remarkable advance in civilisation. Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner would pay a commission to the professional purveyor of bail.

Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or new to the business, she would be given a chance against Officer Smith. She would be called to the witness chair and under oath be allowed to elaborate on the obvious lies which constituted her usual defence. This would give her the opportunity, between the magistrate's questions, of sweeping the court-room with a full, hungry look for as much as half a minute at a time. She saw the women in the audience only, and their clothes. The pity in their eyes did not move her, because she was not in the least interested in what they thought, but in how they looked and what they wore. They were part of a world which she would read about—she read very little—in the society columns of the Sunday newspaper. They were the women around whom headlines were written and whose pictures were printed frequently on the first page.

She could study them with comparative leisure in the Night Court. Outside in the course of her daily routine she might catch an occasional glimpse of these same women, through the windows of a passing taxi, or in the matinée crowds, or going in and out of the fashionable