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plays there. Imagination ran riot in an innocent wayj though I ’m not at all sure that the psycho-folks would agree or approve. My father did, however. He hardly ever entered that nook of ours. He said he was afraid of disturbing our heroes and fairies. But one day near sundown he left his easel. He called me and made me look through the trees at my mother. It was early spring, and she had been busy in her garden. He said very softly: ‘Look, Beatrice. I wish you to get the beauty of this. Your mother—see her! She is picking lilies. See her pure thought reflected in her face! She thinks of Easter—of resurrection, maybe. In this I know she be lieves. It is a lovely sight to look upon. Do not forget it. Be like her!’ And I have not forgotten! The ideal of womanly purity and faith was born in my soul that hour. Do you see what it has meant to me to be, as it were, wounded in this way—as if true love and tender memory were complexes or—” Beatrice’s voice faltered a little. In an instant Althea’s strong young arm, that could be so swift and sure in tennis and so warm and loving in the hour of need for her friends, was over Beatrice’s shoulder, and she leaned her cheek for a moment against the dear golden head of this girl who was meeting the world as i t . is, for the first time, without the parental shelter. “Of course, we understand!” Althea said in her most irresistible tone. “And what is more, the dear Lord un derstands, and He has said: ‘I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.’ All these hurts, that the stupid people back there gave you, came when you needed help the most. Your being ‘hypnotic’ and having ‘complexes’ and ‘it,’ is all just so much rubbish, old dear. Come to California with us, where the world is bright and flowery, and where we have games and hikes and fun to keep us wholesome. Uncle Alan says we must be well-balanced Christians.” “Who is Uncle Alan?” Beatrice enquired as she re moved all traces of tears. “Bless me! The child doesn’t know Uncle Alan!” ex claimed Althea, turning to Constance. “Nor Elise, nor Pauline, nor Lawrence, nor Mr. Wu and Djemileh. But why go over the Thin Red Line! Come! You must come. Train there for Christian work—” A messenger from the hotel met them. “Miss Sumner, your mother has sent for you to come at once to the hotel—” “Is she ill?” in alarm. “No, Madam. ‘She has received a cablegram.” {To be continued )
United States Senators are sixty. If they are, they don’t act, their age.” But Beatrice would not be diverted. “The older people don’t care enough, most of them,” she insisted. “Two generations ago, parents would have agonized over all this, and the depth of their feeling would have made their children pause and think. They would have prayed and worked over them, and would not have been merely entertained. Children react to what their parents are. Since we must be psycho-analyti cal, there is a great basic fact.” “I know!” said Constance. “Parents aren’t deeply con vinced of anything themselves! And it’s the terrific earnestness of the Reds that has captured 1,250,000 young people in the United States.” “What!” “Yes. -The Young Pioneers ! They believe there is no God. No country so terrible, they teadh them, as the dear old U. S. A.!” “How can American youth join that?” asked Althea. “Children of alien parents, perhaps—” , “I am the child of alien parents,” interrupted Beatrice calmly. “There are 37,000,000 of us now. We are real patriots. That is not the answer.” “What are we to do about it?” Constance pondered. “It was a Bible-believing generation that gave us Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Yes, anji Herbert Hoover!” began Beatrice, and Althea took it up. “And how! Back to the Bible as a source-book for raising the young and away with people like those awful ones who said poor Beatrice was repressed and had a father-complex or showed signs of father-fixation, or something!” “Yes, I object,” agreed Beatrice, “to having my loves and griefs tagged and pigeon-holed like that. Up in the mountains of the north where I grew up so happily, we used to say, ‘Harry is grieving still for his father. Let us be good to him!’ No one knew what.a father- complex was. It’s like tearing a blossom apart under the microscope and then expecting it to be a fragrant flower still, to expect young people to keep their vision when they are assailed by Freudian wave-lengths.” Constance was dreaming as she looked over the his toric country about them where, every spot was hallowed by some sacred association.’ “I am thinking that we, at least, have not lost the vision,” she said after a while. “And doesn’t it seem strange to be talking of these modern things in this old land where God said, ‘Afterward . . . I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions’? All these trying-days are just the prelude to the wonderful time ahead.” “Yes,” said Althea, as they turned their steps back toward the city. “The former things will have passed away and we shall remember them no more. Life has become too complex. Even with our youth, we can hardly bear to shoulder the burden that is laid upon us by the ages. Why are you smiling, Beatrice?” “Should you like to know? I was wondering if the wise analysists would call the memory I have in mind a complex,” she replied. “I will tell you. One day I was playing with the little Indian girl who was my only friend until I was fifteen. She had helped me erect a regular wickiup not far from our home. We played wonderful
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