of being domineering and dictatorial in your place of business, you wouldn't think of doing things which would be disastrous to your best interests. You wouldn't jump all over your employees for every little mistake they made; criticize them for every little thing that went wrong; you wouldn't make their lives miserable by your nagging, for you would know that very soon you would have no standing either with them or with your business associates, and that your business would surely suffer. But you seem to think that you can be always scrapping over things in your home, things so trifling that you wouldn't even consider them of sufficient importance to pay any attention to in your business, and yet you expect to have one hundred per cent harmony and efficiency in the home!

setbacks, and hardships, you will come out some way and be successful if you do your best. You expect this. Now, why not expect the same thing in your home? When you are married, make up your mind that you are not going to live on honey and moonbeams all the time. You know very well that inevitably there will be trials, difficulties, disappointments and setbacks, and why not resolve, you husband, and you wife, also, that you are going to make the best of everything that comes, that whatever happens you will pull together and do your best to make your home one-hundred-per-cent efficient and happy.

Try Love's way in the home. Perhaps you have tried the other way long enough-scolding, bickering, whipping, flinging, faultfinding, nagging. What has this ever brought you but discomfort, disagreeable experiences, and unhappiness? It is not the big troubles but the little frets and irritants, the little enemies which destroy the harmony of the home; and without harmony, which is the basis of all good, we never can get the one-hundred-per-cent possibilities of the home.

IF

on you;

IF

IF

Way, How Not To

By OLIN LYMAN

Illustrated by John R. Neill

PART I

A wise old owl lived in an oak:
The more he heard, the less he spoke:
The less he spoke, the more he heard:
Why can't we be like that old bird?

IMNED on wood, the framed wall-motto hung over Mabel Talmadge's desk. Another object was at this moment also hanging over her desk, from the floor upward. He was S. Almon Prout, assistant chief clerk, fuss budget and diary man.

His goggling eyes, of a washed-out blue, were staring at the motto. Loose lips stretched in a derisive smile, then staccatoed words which hurried to their goal, tripping over one another's heels.

"Why d' ya keep that thing? You aren't like that! You can talk a streak if ya want to."

Rather absently Mabel looked toward the sign, thrusting her pencil in the mesh of her auburn hair and leaning back in her chair. She spoke, her low, rich, throbbing contralto in refreshing contrast to Prout's nasal twang.

"Oh, it's only an ideal. We can't reach it, of course; we all talk too much," she conceded, with faint emphasis. "But it's rather nice to think we might be more owlish if we tried. Besides, I like the poetry. There' bling to it!"

"Think so if ya want to," cbicred S. Almon. "I can't see anything to it. Logic; that's what it lacks-logic. If you were an owl, now, in an oak, you wouldn't get anywhere. You'd stay in the woods."

"I'm going to find out what's what. Keeps ya busy, after these lame ducks."

"Four," she corrected.

“Well, four. Will you go?"

She considered for an unflattering interval. But this he minded not at all. "Faint heart never won fair lady," he would have said, and let it go at that.

"Yes, Mr. Prout, I think I'll go; and, thank you," she told him. Her air was of polite indifference. But then, he would have reasoned, she was that way toward all would-be cavaliers. She didn't go about much; she could have had beaux all the time. She was home evenings with her mother, mostly. It meant something to be seen in her company. His embryonic soul expanded like a downy puff ball.

"I'll call at eight?" he syllabled eagerly.

"If you please. And now really you must let me get at these letters. Mr. Swinley will be wondering what he's paying me a salary for. And he'll be back from lunch any minute."

"I'll go!" he exclaimed, with a timorous look at the door of the manager's office as he straightened to his five feet, ten, of wispy, crane-legged, narrow-shouldered length. "I've got to get back to ay own office. I've got to comb a fellow afternoon; curry him right!"

"Who?"

"Granger, of course. I'm after him all the time. I'll te' he world he's no good. Mix-up on his columns; he worked most all night and couldn't find it; I'm going to find out what's what. Keeps ya busy, after these lame ducks." He buzzed away like an unwieldy dragon fly. Mabel Talmadge breathed a fervent sigh before

her slim fingers sought the keys of her typewriter. It was a tasteful little office in which she worked. With its paneled walls and mahogany furniture and polished floor it was indicative of the bulk, power and solid basis of The Riverton Mills. The largest cotton-weaving corporation in New England, or the country, was adequately housed and its offices were ornate.

Why not? There were generations of thrift and steady success behind it. It was backed by millions. Its markets were worldwide. It was a fair sample of the big New England corporation, a class unique in the industrial world.

Riverton, a town of about ten thousand residents, owed its existence wholly to the fact that the founders of the cotton-goods mills had selected that site some sixty years before. They had built a dam and harnessed the power of the little Nasswai River. The original mill, constructed of red brick, had been small, and the preliminary modest building plan had been lost in the long rows of buildings, three and four stories high, which gave employment to thousands of the pretty villages over which floated, all day long, plumes of smoke from the tall stacks.

Set amid the rolling hills of central Massachusetts, Riverton was picturesque, prosperous, and filled with the crude "pep" of a typical milltown. Owing its existence to the mills it was, of course, dominated by the corporation. Its policies were decided by representatives of stockholders at headquarters in New York, as were those of many another manufacturing town, similarly sponsored, in the section.

However, as The Riverton Mills corporation was progressive, this had worked to the advantage of the community rather than otherwise. The company, contrasted with some others equally large, was a valuable constructive force.

Mabel paused in her typing for a moment and gazed out of the window. Dreams of June were in her brown eyes; her lovely face was wistful with the sense of summer beauties beyond the rushing river. Green hills climbed toward the blue, their crests studded with whispering groves. In the sky sailed tiny white cloud patches, like balls of fluffy down flung by the hands of gods. Up sundry slopes climbed the town, the furthest dwellings looking like toy houses. Church spires glinted in sunlight; to the east gleamed the emerald of the park in the heart of the town; over all was an atmosphere of prosperity, of attainment, of well-being.

To the girl's ears, through the screened window, floated sounds of the unrest that is life. There was the snarl of a passing trolley car. Automobiles thrummed, drays lumbered and

rattled, human footsteps thudded upon the walks.

Now in the adjacent corridor came commotion of entry. Edward Swinley, general manager, whose stenographer she was, always came in that way. Mabel turned to the machine and rapidly finished the last one of his letters which she was typing.

She smiled a little as the bell rang upon her desk, accompanying Swinley's pressing of a button in the adjacent large office. She was ready for him! She had always been, since taking the job two years previously following a year's experience with an importing house in Boston. She had come to Riverton with credentials which proclaimed that she was "chain lightning." Swinley, who had never before had a stenographer who could keep up with him, had found her so. In consequence she had become one of the best-paid women secretaries of the country. She entered the big office, fit for the tenancy of a potentate of business. Swinley greeted her with an ursine growl. It was his way of registering good nature.

He was a little, round, gray man with querulous hair which stood on end. His feverish eyes snapped fire and brimstone from behind thick glasses. He gestured like a Frenchman. His headlong manner enveloped the maxim of twentieth-century American business: "Get a wiggle on, for to-morrow ye die." His voice was a fretful whine under breakneck tempo. It was a composite of force that had made him known throughout the world. But he all too evidently got no fun out of it. His meld of pepper was unrelieved by any relish of humor.

M

ABEL laid the sheaf of letters on his desk and, withdrawing the pencil from her hair, began to make pothooks upon her pad as he began to talk. She rarely sat down to take his dictation. He gave her no time.

"Ha-aaa, Miss Talmadge! Caught up? Good! Take this: John Slocum 'n' Co., N' York, and so forth: Yours of third inst., contents, and so forth. In regard to your propo'-scratch it out. Your propo' is untenable, for reason-refer back to Hawkins letter, sometime in May, an' give 'em the same dope, Miss Talmadge. Yours truly!"

So he continued, in hit-or-miss, catch-as-catchcan style for a half-hour. After the third letter, Mabel managed to snatch a moment to slip into the chair next his desk and rest her notebook on her knee.

As she rose, after taking the last letter, Swinley rubbed together pudgy hands and grinned at her like a cherry-cheeked old satyr.

"Good! I'm going out for a round of golf at the country club. Slam these out. Sign 'em yourself. Mail 'em. And then run away somewhere and play."

Nodding her thanks, the girl entered her office and renewed her staccato attack upon the typewriter keys. In the middle of the first letter she heard the lid of Swinley's desk go bang. He stormed out. In a few moments the purr of his motor-car receded out of the mill yard that was kept fastidiously through the summer by employes hired to shave the lawns and mind the flower plots.

Old man Swinley might be an old bruin but if so he had proved that bears have hearts. He had fought for the innovations of these lawns as savagely as he fought for business in the world's markets. Often he had gone to the mat with the directors in matters of recreation rooms, playgrounds, town groves, free public-libraries, everything to make Riverton "the most contented milltown on earth," as he expressed it. Always he had won, though more than once he had dangled the threat of his resignation before the dismayed eyes of invested capital in order to have his way.

A hateful and lovable old devil was Swinley, and his men would have entered trenches for him at any time.

By the middle of the afternoon, Mabel, having left the letters ready. for the mail collection, tripped out of the office and walked down elmshaded Main Street, fringed with pretty bungalows beyond the business section to Oak Street. Up this she turned and entered a white cottage where she lived with her widowed mother.

cended to her room, hung with gay summer chintz, to make ready for the grove dance which she had promised to attend with S. Almon Prout. Standing finally by the window, dainty in white gown and with the flush of rose-leaf cheeks no less delicate than the sheen of her carefully coiffured auburn hair, her eyes sparkled with anticipation as she gazed toward the grove where the first of the Chinese lanterns were just winking awake. There was reason for her elation. Most of her time was spent in a round of duties. A few hours of pleasure made a welcome interlude.

"You see,"

Mrs. Mary Talmadge was a pale, pretty, gray-haired woman, with the resigned air of one whose interests have been always looked after by a stronger nature. For the rest of the afternoon, Mabel busied herself with a lace waist which she was making for her mother, because Mrs. Talmadge plaintively declared that no dressmaker in Riverton-or Boston, for that matter could do it as well.

It was a Wednesday evening-"prayer meeting night" an established institution through rural New England, and Mabel saw her mother safely away with a neighbor, after supper, bound for the Baptist church nearby. Then she as

The dusk had deepened; the radiance of moon and stars was growing stronger. She studied the waxing glory of the night. In her absorption, she started at the ringing of the doorbell. Oddly the exaltation died out of her face. Tossing a white silken mantle over her shoulders, she switched off the electric lights and went downstairs. It was the maid's night out.

She found S. Almon Prout waiting, thin and sticklike in his Palm Beach flimsies. He swept off his panama with a flourish; his hawk's face spread in an ingratiating smile.