Judge, 1916-03-11 · page 11 of 28
Judge — March 11, 1916 — page 11: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
**Top Cartoon ("Latest News"):** Shows a couple in an old automobile with a newsboy below. The satire mocks sensationalist journalism—the couple is reading about their own elopement in the papers, suggesting the media broadcasts private scandals with exaggerated drama. **Main Story ("Her Secret"):** A darkly ironic tale by G. Vere Tyler about a woman tormented for years by a secret she guards obsessively. The punchline—revealed only at the end—is that her secret is simply **her age**. This satirizes vanity and society's pressure on women regarding aging, particularly in the early 20th century when women's social value was closely tied to youth and marriageability. **Bottom Cartoon ("In Reduced Circumstances"):** A brief dialogue joke about marital deception, playing on the era's attitudes about husbands deceiving wives as socially acceptable. The page's humor relies on exaggerated anxiety about secrets that seem trivial by modern standards, reflecting period obsessions with propriety, gossip, and women's appearance.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
HER SECRET Fee many years she had borne her secret, never for one whole day escaping its terrifying influe Day by day she had developed into a coward, a creature al afraid, as though one st word would condemn her. There were those associated with her youth who knew her secret, and she was afraid of them as though they carried pistols. She avoided her family, except to see them pri- vately when no strangers were around, none of those who made up her present life. oided visits to her old home town for fear of some chan ion of it. In that old home town were people who knew! Sometimes one of these offenders died, and she experienced relief; there was one less to tell—to be- tray her. Time that generally lessens the acute torture of things, only added tohers. Every time any one looked scrut ingly at her, she expe- rienced a little tremor of fear that they had discovered or heard. She took to lying about herself and her life, to lead people astray—olf the track. She denied her presence at certain places at certain times, even denied her acquaintance with certain persons more or less intimat associated with her. Her father knew them, or her brother, but not she At last she fell ill, and it was not the illness that caused her the terrible feverish i It the fear that if she died her secret would leak out. en the papers might get hold of it. It would be * printed broadcast She grew pale—she writhed in the agony not of death but of fear. Her secret was her age. G. Vere Tyler LATEST NEWS- —ALL ABOUT THEIR OWN ELOPEMENT iii nin fl il Il li an il) | Alle Of Course Catterson—Do you think it pays for a man always to de- ceive his wife? Hatterson—It may not always pay, old fellow, only honorable thing to do. but it’s the IN REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES comicbooks.com