About this time last year I was fortunate enough to go to a very nice children’s party, or, rather, a very nice party for children.  I add the appreciative epithet because there was only one grown-up person there, and that person was not I; and when all is said it may be stated confidently that the fewer the grown-ups the better the children’s party.  Nevertheless, although there was only one grown-up for about thirty children, and she the most charming and tactful of girls, I had not been long in the place of fairy-lamps before I discovered that with one exception I was the youngest person there.  I had come out that night in the proper party frame of mind.  My shoes were tight and my mind was full of riddles of which I had forgotten the answers, and as I drove along in a four-wheeler—who ever went to a party p. 240in anything else?—I noticed that the stars smelt of tangerine oranges.  When I reached the house everything looked all right.  The place was very busy, and there were lots of white frocks and collars, and pink faces.

Yes, it ought to have been a jolly party, but it came about twenty years too late, and the children, I had almost added, were about twenty years too old.  Instead of forgetting everything else in the whirl and clamour of play and dancing, they were, it seemed to me, too busy registering the impressions to enjoy themselves.  One of them, a child of eleven, was already smitten with a passion for the mot juste.  “My tongue,” she told me gravely, “is like a cloud”; and, later, “a marigold is like a circus.”  She had a crushing word for a comrade who was looking at herself in a mirror.  “But you don’t really look as nice as you do in the looking-glass!”  The other children did not seem much better, and I stood forlornly in their midst, as a child stands among the creased trouser-legs of its elders, until I saw a scared little face in a corner apart from the rest.  “Why aren’t you playing?” I asked.  The p. 241child looked me straight in the face, and burst into a thousand tears.  At least here was something young, something not wholly wise.  We sat together, exchanging grave confidences all the evening.

Possibly this is a queer way in which to start an article on common sense, but there is more than madness in my method, for I feel assured that the children have derived their new wisdom—a senseless wisdom, a wisdom of facts—from their absurd parents.  The latest creed, the belief that comfort for the masses prevents remorse in the individual, may be well enough in its way, but it creates a very bad atmosphere in which to bring up children.  They are taught that life is an agglomeration of facts, and no sort of miracle, and by learning these facts like little parrots they lose the whole thrill and adventure of life.  They do not go out to kill dragons, because they know that there are no dragons there.  Chivalry survived with children long after common sense had killed it as dead as mutton in the adult mind.  But now they, too, have found it out, and there are only a few silly poets and mad p. 242lovers to keep the memory of Quixote green.

What are these facts by which we are to guide our lives, of which, indeed, our lives are to consist?  One of the simplest, one that has come to have the force of a proverbial expression, is the fact that two and two make four, and this is one of the first things we teach our children.

I have a friend who suspects that in moments of intense consciousness two and two, weary of making four, would make five for a change.  I have heard it argued against him by mathematicians that the fourness of four—four’s very existence, as it were—depends on its being related to two in the subtle fashion suggested by the well-known dogma, but I can discern no grounds for this assertion.  Consider the fate that would befall a man who went for a ride on an omnibus for the purpose of making use of this one fact.  He might be aware that the fare to Putney was fourpence, and, proud of his mathematical knowledge, might pay his fare in two inst............