Judge — November 1932 — page 20: what you’re looking at

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

FOND PARENT—IJ'm so sorry you weren't here Tuesday. She hit it Tuesday. Mastress Pepys’ Journal By Baird Leonard OOPERSTOWN, N. Y., October 10. —Awake betimes, reading in the publick prints of the hub- bub that goes on over James J. Walker, home from his travels, and did decide that were I a cradled in- fant approached by a good fairy with promising overtures, I should ask to be made ingratiating, so that I might be cheered ‘instead of punished for my misdemeanors and defections. Sam in early with a request for my manicure scissors, a delicate gadget by which I set such store that I did ask, not without trepidation, what he proposed to do with them, where- upon he quoth, “Open a tin can,” a response which did fail, despite its sarcasm, to put me at my ease, for- usmuch as his own misplaced nail clippers have come to look like a pair of garage pliers. Lord! who steals my purse steals trash, indeed, but he who filches from me my favorite toilet tweezers inspires me to hobnob straightway with the Pinkertons. Moved to lie abed this morning, so fell upon “The More I See of Men,” a symposium in which nine women novelists of note discuss the male sex from various angles with gay shrewdness, and I did feel about the last sentence of Susan Ertz’s paper much as General Wolfe felt about wray’s Elegy, albeit in this day I ought probably say that I had liefer have wrote it than go to Quebec on the morrow, the sentence being apropos of the self-forgetfulness which the male values above aught in the world, “And that, I thought, is why men have made, and, I sus- pect, always will make, the best martyrs, poets, saints, scientists, and clowns.” Moreover, I did set down a note of my own to be used in some future discourse on the same sub- ject, to the effect that whilst man will risk his life to get a woman out of a burning building or to save her from drowning, he will treat her like a stepchild if she wakens him in the night to ask him if he hears a strange noise in the scullery, or if he smells smoke. To Long Island in the late afternoon to dine with Eleanor and Jimmy Van Alen, find- ing there Mistress Bacon, whose spouse is candidate for Congress in Nassau County against young Cor- nelius Whitney, and she did tell us that when she saw a headline “Vets Out for Whitney” she was not per- turbed, it being natural for the few 18 horse doctors extant to rally round ; stable containing hundreds of ani- mals rather than round one shelteriny: only four. Much talk of politicks, the pre-election feeling on Long Island running higher, wider, and more humorous ‘than aught this country has seen since the days of McKinley and Bryan, but there was an archi- tect present who contrived to insert a paragraph about some nouveaux riches for whom he had built a palace, and who, bereft of suitable local acquaintance, did give a house- warming dinner consisting of him- self, the landscape gardner, the music teacher, the dentist, and Bishop Manning. CTOBER 11.—By the first post a foot of hemp, without any cover soever, to which was tened a tay proclaiming the thrills in a new m; tery yarn, “Rope to Spare,” but it was beer to Munich as far as con- cerned me, an advance having forced me to unaccustomed early slumber two nights agone, forasmuch as the bulb in my bedlight expired whilst I was in the midst of its horrors, and I was too fearsome to arise in the darkness and replace it. Lisa Wemple to see me, chattering of various items, which, albeit the majority of them were within my own experi- ence, I had taken no special note of, but Lord! it is hopeless to compete in observation with Lisa, who is the kind of woman who cannot be in a house ten minutes without marking that the parlourmaid is in love with the second man, or that two ceiling sconces twenty feet apart are not mates. I did ask her to stop for luncheon, but she pled another en- gagement without identifying it, be- ing also the kind of woman who deliberately withholds information about her destination and compan- ions, thinking, mayhap, that her curious victims will infer that she is dining with Admiral Beatty or Arch- bishop Hayes, when as a matter of record, she has arranged to go to the cinema with her child’s gov- erness. So had my own meal on a tray, of cold duck, stuffed oranges, and salad, and then, doing on my new red tailleur, off to have tea with the clergyman who is to christen my latest godchild, in the hopes of wheel- ing him into addressing me when he calls for the infant’s name, foras- much as I am resorting to foul means to save it from going through life as Mehitabel, a point on which its par- ents have carried their passion for early Americana a furlong too far. comicbooks.com