Life is queerly inverted in Marathon.  Nature has been so bullied and repressed that she fawns about us timidly.  No well-conducted suburban shrubbery would think of assuming autumn tints before the ladies have got into their fall fashions.  Indeed none of our chaste trees will even shed their leaves while any one is watching; and they crouch modestly in the shade of our massive garages.  They have been taught their place.  In Marathon it is a worse sin to have your lawn uncut than to have your books or your hair uncut.  I have been aware of indignant eyes because I let my back garden run wild.  And yet I flatter myself it was not mere sloth.  No!  I want the Urchin to see what this savage, tempestuous world is like.  What preparation for life is a village where Nature comes to heel like a spaniel?  When a thunderstorm disorganizes our electric lights for an hour or so we feel it a personal affront.  Let my rearward plot be a deep-tangled wild-wood where the happy Urchin may imagine something more ferocious lurking than a posse of radishes.  Indeed, I hardly know whether Marathon is a safe place to bring up a child.  How can he learn the horrors of drink in a village where there is no saloon?  Or the sadness of the seven deadly sins where there is no movie?  Or deference to his betters where the chauffeurs, in their withered leather legs, drive limousines to the drug store to buy expensive cigars, while their employers walk to the station puffing briar pipes?

I had been hoping that the war would knock some of this topsy-turvy nonsense out of us.  Maybe it has.  Sometimes I see on the faces of our commuters the unaccustomed agitation of thought.  At least we still have the grace to call ourselves a suburb, and not (what we fancy ourselves) a superurb.  But I don’t like the pretense that runs like a jarring note through the music of our life.  Why is it that those who are doing the work must pretend they are not doing it; and those not doing the work pretend that they are?  I see that the motor messenger girls who drive high-powered cars wear Sam Browne belts and heavy-soled boots, whereas the stalwart colored wenches who labor along the tracks of the Cinder and Bloodshot console themselves with flimsy waists and light slippers.  (A fact!) By and by the Urchin will notice these things.  And I don’t want him to grow up the kind of chap who, instead of running to catch a train, loiters gracefully to the station and waits to be caught.

THE SMELL OF SMELLS

I Smelt it this morning—­I wonder if you know the smell I mean?

It had rained hard during the night, and trees and bushes twinkled in the sharp early sunshine like ballroom chandeliers.  As soon as I stepped out of doors I caught that faint but unmistakable musk in the air; that dim, warm sweetness.  It was the smell of summer, so wholly different from the crisp tang of spring.

It is a drowsy, magical waft of warmth and fragrance.  It comes only when the leaves and vegetation have grown to a certain fullness and juice, and when the sun bends in his orbit near enough to draw out all the subtle vapors of field and woodland.  It is a smell that rarely if ever can be discerned in the city.  It needs the wider air of the unhampered earth for its circulation and play.