Judge — August 18, 1917 — page 6: what you’re looking at

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

was on and fully furnished with a rail fence and a crown and curtains that were the heaviest thing in deep mourning. I found out after- ward it was all Francois Premier. Well, if Francois liked that kind of a bedroom he must have been practising for a long time to come when he'd be lying out in the family mausoleum. I passed a troubled night and came down for breakfast. Nelly met me and led me along. Certainly the breakfast room was pretty. After my night in the catacombs the sight of some light and color cheered me up a bit. There were lots of mirrors about with curly frames and gold chairs, and I was glad to let Nelly see I was pleased. The table setting was real pretty too, though there was mighty little on “*Don’t you love it?’ y cried. ‘All Louis-Quatorze and everything—every single thing in it absolutely authentic and of the period.’ “Except you and me,’ I said, and I noticed she did not look altogether pleased. ‘And, let me see,’ I said, ‘when did Louis- Quatorze have his name in the directory?’ Oh, in fourteen hundred and fifteen hundred,’ she answered coldly, “Well, well,’ said I, ‘and everything authentic and of the time! I continued, looking at the table, ‘I hope that the eggs I never saw a perfectly harmless little joke—one that never hurt anybody except the man who made it—fall flatter. It did not take at all. She might have been vaccinated against it. You see she'd got to taking this matter of periods so to heart from what t architect had told her, that an anachronism hit her in the eye like acinder. Ilefther in tears. She seemed to think this was authentic Louis-Quatorze fast enough. “T didn’t go over the house with Nelly, and that was the first sign that we were ‘drifting apart.’ In fact, I didn’t see her until I got back from down-town in the afternoon. I wanted the evening news- paper. I discovered that it had been put by the butler in the new Tudor library. But it was not there. Apparently Nelly had seen it and, shocked by the presence of ‘The Evening Democrat and Re- publican’ in a room where a copy of ‘The Faerie Queene’ would be about the only correct thing in last editions, had ordered it away. I tried to work it out in my mind. I couldn’t see that she would consent to have it in the Byzantine reception room, or the Ren; sance music room, or the Moorish conservatory, and I gave it up. In a rapid glance at history I couldn't find any period in the museum we had in the house where as an exhibit ‘The Democrat and Re- publican’ would exactly fit in. “Is your mackintosh rain-proof?” “Perfectly—it is always somewhere else, when it rains! “T walked out and came on Nelly at the telephone. It was on a marble table in a Pompeian court. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘you're tel reserved seats. What is it tonight—gladiators or Christian martyrs?” ‘Oh, if you want to be disagreeable’—she replied. ‘Why, not at all,’ I answered with a chilled steel kind of humor, ‘I'm glad I found the phone. I'd like to call up Julius Caesar and ask him the latest from Gaul.’ Nelly put down the receiver and looked at me. ““T think you are perfectly right,’ she said. ‘I shall have every telephone taken out of the house and I find I have a very bad head- ache and I shall not come down to dinner tonight.’ She rose and swept out of the court, “T dined that night at the club, At breakfast I did not see Nelly. By afternoon I was feeling a deeply injured man. That afternoon when I was playing golf with Birdsley and had lost the fourteenth, the fifteenth and sixteenth holes and was in the ‘Hell's to Pay’ bunker on the seventeenth, one down and two to play, I made up my mind that if Nelly wanted periods she should have them. ‘ome back to dinner with me tonight,’ I said to Birdsley, ‘and don’t be surprised at anything that happens.’ “The dining-room I knew was Georgian. Now a novel that I'd just read gave me a very good idea of what the domestic manners of a thorough-going gentleman of the good old time of George the Third were like. Nelly should have a sample. If sbe phoning to the Coliscum for wanted things accurate she should have a husband to go with every ‘period’ in the place. “Well, I began that evening with the eighteenth century in England. At dinner I told the butler to bring six bottles of port. “*That’s three for you and three for me,’ I said to Birdsley as Nelly was leaving us. ‘Of course you're a three bottle man. Birdsley who took nothing but one cocktail before dinner and knew that I never drank anything except a glass of claret thought I was headed straight for Bloomingdale. After ly was gone I had the butler put the bottles back on the sideboard but Birdsley straightened his eye-glasses when finally I rose unsteadily from the table. “Let's join the ladi I hiccoughed and reeled toward the door. “When I entered the Colonial sitting room, copied from an old Virginian manor house, I began by falling on the floor. Then I kicked the Pomeranian through the fire screen. Then I sank heavily into a chair closed my eyes and commenced to make a noise like a sleeping car when it stops at a way station at Mother—If you would always wear sensible shoes you would never have a com. Bess—Nor a husband, | fear! three in the morning. Birdsley said that Nelly took (Continued on second page following) comicbooks.com