Judge — July 14, 1923 — page 15: what you’re looking at

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

“What's the matter with Si Butterworth?” “Oh, he fell offa load o’ hay last week, an’ landed butter-side down!” The Background by Jessie Hein Ernst ER NAME was Valerie French and rubic, with blue cyes and golden hair and Joe Jenkins adored her. had youth and a job that five hundred dollars a With Valerie as his wife aid thirty- year. he felt life would be one long delicious dream. Often he had sat in the small top floor room that Valerie called her studio and listened to her talk about her ambitions, the thrill of blank verse, as slowly the single gas jet covered with cerise paper grew so dim that he could scare ¢ her glorious sun- colored hair. Then awkwardly (Joe was always awkward when Valerie was near him) he apol- ogetically put another quarter in the gas meter. Valerie had a long stretch of what she called hard luck. She said there was no market for high- class poetry. The small studio was exchanged for a still smaller one, and one day Valerie an- nounced to Joe that she was now a waitress in a lunch Joe took courage. He proposed mar- ge to Valerie. Not of course suggesting that she could possibly love anyone as plain looking as himself, but he offered himself for practical purposes. “You Valerie,” he stammered, “we're paying double rent. You and room. At this see, The musician’s baby. 13 I could live more cheaply together getting a lot more value out of things, if we sort of combined households. I've got a kitchenette and all I'd need would be an extra room for you. And you could go on writing poetry and always know Td be somewhere in’ the back- ground looking after you. It would give you freedom.” Freedom was the word Valerie adored. Valerie looked at Joe as though for the first time. He looked un- objectionable. Valerie suggested that it sounded possible. She never had relatives like most girls. Her parents had died when she was quite young. “To be able to devote all of my time to my art without worry- ing about rent would help my work a lot—give me more freedom. We might try it with the under- standing if it didn’t work out well, we'd get a divorce.” Joe was so unspeakably happy that his voice deserted him. Valerie continued with a little perplexed frown, “My week here is up to-morrow, now you go over to your rooms and find out if there is’another room that you can rent, then you come back comicbooks.com