which our books, old and new, and our newspapers and magazines were teeming.

And idols we used to worship collapsed before us — the idol of sentiment, and the idol of imagi-nation, and the idols of delicacy, femininity, and coyness: all the idols of the Middle Ages.

Our writing had been imitative, parrot-like; it became personal. It had been oratorical and fervid, or soft and musical; it became calm, dry, concise. We used to employ abstract, vague words; we came to choose the words of science and the laboratory, distinguished by preci-sion and clarity. And we took to pausing at every word we wrote or spoke, and our pen grew perplexed, hesitant, wanting inspiration.

Each of us, if asked her subject of specialization, would say it was medicine, or biology, or physics, or chemistry. Specialization in literature and its kind was met with astonishment and wonder, and its owner would try to find excuses for her foolish choice.

But the circles of debate did not lack one girl, come from western Europe — from the dawning-place of light — who showed her contempt for the theories of modern science and scorned to make a god of it, for she was specializing in politics and history, and hated mathematics with an earnest hatred.

And an Eastern colleague would oppose her — a student of chem-istry — striking the table with her hand, with the earnestness of one assured, as she said: "I am drawn by facts, not by fancies. I want to study real things, that can be touched with the hand. As for literature, I find no practical use whatever in studying it."

I felt some change in my position when the students' magazine appeared, containing a droll little story which I learned, after some pains, to contain a veiled satire of certain scientific theories — and its author was our girl specializing in politics, come from beyond the seas.

And in the same issue appeared verse of skillful composition, without a signature, which we discovered afterward to be the work of the physics teacher, who was accomplished in the art of acting and in ever so many of the arts of the hand, besides poetry and physics. At last... here was one of the pillars of modern science who did not disown art nor disdain poetry.

Then I resolved to bring out a counter-magazine, and in composition class I proposed that the subject of the next debate be: which is the stronger token of civ-ilization, the flourishing of science or the flourishing of literature?

I took the side of literature, and delivered my defense with fervor

and in a literary style elegant of phrase but limited in ideas.

My opponent did the opposite. She came with a long list of proofs and evidences — I know not where she gathered them — proofs showing the merit of science and its glorious feats: how, by the scientific method, it commands all the faces of knowledge, and, by invention and discovery, all the conveniences of modern life. And she closed by saying, after the manner of the people of the nineteenth century, that it is the magic power that will turn our earth into a heaven.

And although each of us strayed from her subject and misunderstood and mispresented it, I saw all those present give their votes to my opponent. The defeat pained me... and perhaps from that time on I have remained perplexed between science and literature, and have settled upon neither.

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