Judge, 1911-11-11 · page 6 of 24
Judge — November 11, 1911 — page 6: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains two distinct pieces of satire about early 20th-century social behavior. **Top Cartoon ("Quantitative"):** A crude visual joke about a rude dinner guest asking the hostess to "put me in a lump in my tea"—a deliberate misunderstanding of proper phrasing, suggesting boorish behavior at a formal gathering. **Main Story ("What Was In It"):** The satire targets a verbose, absent-minded woman reporting a lost handbag to a lost-and-found department. Her exhaustive, rambling inventory—listing every mundane item from socks to tooth powder to a postcard from Maine—ridicules the tendency of some people (especially women of means) to provide excessive, tedious detail when unnecessary. The clerk's repeatedly polite attempts to interrupt are met with "and also a..." continuations. The humor lies in the contrast between the triviality of her possessions and her elaborate cataloguing, satirizing both excessive chattiness and perhaps the materialism of the leisured class. Both pieces use familiar social situations to mock character flaws: rudeness and compulsive over-explanation.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
& & ® e & & & ® ® ® ® ® & & ® esses ¢@ & &@ & & & BS QUANTITATIVE. Robust guest-—'* Jast put me in a lump in my tea, will you?”” “J LEFT my handbag on the car not ’ more than an hour ago, and I want to know if it has been turned i said a somewhat excited woman, appearing at the lost-article department of astreet- “I feel perfectly sure that I left it on the car, for’’—— “What kind cf a bag was it, madam?"’ “A small, seal-brown cloth bag, with trimmings of brown leather ana brass. It had’*-—— “Can you describe the contents? There is no such bag here, but if one comes in answering to your description, we will notify you. What was in it?”” “Well, I'm not sure that I can tell everything there was in the bag, but there was a pair of black silk hose I had just bought, and a couple of white linen handkerchiefs with a narrow edge of torchon lace, and a pair of tan-colored kid gloves, size six and a half, and a paper of pins of mixed sizes, and two skeins of scarlet yarn for crocheting bedroom slippers, and a ball of brown darning cotton, and a pair of soles for bedroom slippers, and a bottle of cam- phor pellets and another of belladonna What Was In it = pellets, and a tissue-paper pattern, and three yards of Hamburg edging, and a yard and a quarter remnant of dimity, and two yards of cheese cloth I had bought for dust cloths, and a yard of black net veiling, and a card of small white pearl buttons, and three yards of white tape, and a spool of number sixty white cotton, and a cut-steel pearl buckle that I'd hate dreadfully to lose, for I got it at a special sale for fifty- nine cents, and I saw that very buckle marked a dojlar and a half two weeks ago, and’’—— “That willdo, madam. We will’”’—— “Then there was a yard and a quarter of pale-blue chiffon, and three yards of three-inch watered-silk ribbon of the same shade, and a bottle of liquid shoe polish, and two yards of coarse crash for dish cloths, and a box of hair pins, and two pairs of number ten black socks for my husband, and a bottle of liquid dentifrice. I alway buy that kind, for I think that there may be gritty sub- stances in tooth powders that will scratch the enamel of the teeth. Then there was a’’—— “*You have told us enough of the con- tents of the bag for us to’’—— “One thing in the bag that I’m sure wouldn’t be in any other bag is a die for calling cards, with my name on it. I was just going to leave it at the en- graver’s, but I forgot it, and— Oh, yes! there was also in the bag a picture post card that the postman brought me just as I was leaving home. It was from my sister, who is spending the summer down in Maine, and the post card was of her little bungalow. She likes it very much, and I think that the Maine coast is beautiful at this time of the year, and I am going to spend a week with my sister before she comes home, and— Yes, and I remember that there was a pair of white kid gloves in the bag I meant to leave downtown to have cleaned, and also a’’—— “That will be quite enough to identify the bag, madam.’’ “The bag itself is about nine inches long by perhaps eight inches in height. It wasn’t a regular shopping bag—just an odd-size little-handbag. There were several other things in it. I could send est? 8 & &@ de &© SF 8 F comicbooks.com