Judge — April 23, 1910 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE GENIAL PHILOSOPHER ON CLUBS. By JOHN KENDRICK BAN YVIAT 1 hike about this club is that it is so homelike,” said Little Binks, as he stretched himself out over two chairs and dropped his cigar ashes into the waste basket. “If aclub isn’t homelike, it is no good."” “Ha—hum! 4 the Genial Philosopher. ‘ You think so, do you, Binksy? Well, I don’t know. I never saw th inside of your home, but if it is anything like this, I h congratulate you, The trouble about making a club I homelike is that so much depends on what different men consider to be homelike. Take old Rob instance. Digg’ this club made like his home, there wouldn't be two members left de of six month: Robinson's idea of a home is acold-storage warehouse for tidies and tea-store bric- a-brac, You can't move six inches in his drawing-room without stubbing your toe on some kind of a fancy-work footstool in which great, glass-eyed cats, done in pink and green floss, surrounded with blue tassels, lie in state. If I ever saw one of those things in my club after a good dinner, I'd have an uneasy feeling inside of me that I'd better go on the water-wagon for a year or two. Then his hallways are decorated with a wall paper that would give an African explorer the jimmies. Great gold lions standing on their hind legs, sniffing baskets of solferino plums, draped with Iceland moss, and surmounted by orange pinwheels casting out sparks of green fire, greet the eye in every direction; and his bedrooms are so full of fur- niture of various kinds that after you have put out the light and started for the bed, your chances of getting there without skinning your shins and an- kles are about one in forty-seven mil- lion, Then take Jibbers, Ever been in Jibbers’s home, Binks? “No; [don’t like Jibbers,” said Binks. “ Well,”" said the old gentle- man, “I judge Je once, and, by thunde OVERHEARD AT THE AERO CLUB. Hiram—"* People as wants to can go in them things, but you ‘ll never get the wife and me in one."* from Jibbers’s home that if he wanted a homelike club we should find the walls covered with old-fashioned, ten-dollar crayon por- traits of past Jibberses. You can't look anywhere around that house without seeing a gibbering ancestral Jibbers staring at you out of a morass of white pasteboard surrounded by a beaded gold frame of the A. T. Stewart period of art. On his mantel- pieces he always has two of everything, as if he thought the shelves thereof were placed on a stick and would come down with a crash if they didn’t balance. Even his rugs balance, looking exactly the same downside up as upside down, so that the housemaid who is in too much of a hurry to sweep them can make things look spick and span by merely turning them over; and he hasn't one single comfortable chair in his house. I am afraid, if we made this club homelike after the Jibbers pattern, we'd have to sublet it for a lunatic asylum in the summertime to make up for the lost dues of the resigned members, And then there is Billie Wimpleton—do you know what Billie Wimpleton’s notion of a homelike spot is ** No, he never told me ** Well, Wimpleton wants a hallway filled up with hobby- id Binks. horses and baby carriages,"’ said the Genial Philosopher. “ His drawing-room is never quite so beautiful to Wimpleton as when the floor is covered with mechanical toys, and you can’t step two inches in any direction without planking your feet down on a regiment of tin soldiers. I judge from my experi- ence, spending a night at his home last summer, that to be homelike for Wimpleton a club would have to have a pair of twins yelling like mad at the top of every staircase in the building; and as for the dining- room, that would have to be provid- ed with a raft of kids from three years old up to nine, eating bread and molasses, and patting the guests on the shirt front with nice little paddies covered with butter and brown bread. So