herself. And as for the husband's conjugal experience, neither Mr. Tarkington nor the husband himself seems to regard that as matter of much consequence. There is no intimate illumination of the "sexual problem" whatever. What The Midlander said to me, on first consideration, was simply this: "If you are a well-rooted midwestern man with a stake in your section of the country, for heaven's sake don't marry one of these silly little New York flappers, but marry the fine big healthy midwestern girl next door." And so I wrote, as the heading for this review: "Mr. Tarkington Discountenances Sectional Miscegenation."
The argument for this view is that the mild humor of the book is an intersectional humor. The author has considerable legitimate midwestern fun at the expense of our metropolitans. The New York girl and her family are place-proud and family proud; and they think of the west and westerners as "just awful"—without, of course, really knowing anything of the subject except what they learn from the red barbarians of the Chicago school. Mr. Tarkington makes a valuable contribution to intersectional understanding by showing that old midwestern cities also have their old proud families, proud of their bank accounts, and their brains, and their achievements,—yes, but proud also of their blood and their ancestors, and aristocratically hostile to the dilution of their virtues by inter-marriage with wasters and wastrels.
But the more I think of it, the more I suspect
