i said. "of course, in your position of unofficial adviser and helper to everybody who is absolutely puzzled, throughout three continents, you are brought in contact with all that is strange and bizarre. but here"—i picked up the morning paper from the ground—"let us put it to a practical test. here is the first heading upon which i come. ‘a husband’s cruelty to his wife.’ there is half a column of print, but i know without reading it that it is all perfectly familiar to me. there is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. the crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude."