Life — May 12, 1887 — page 7: what you’re looking at

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

- LIFE: 263 A CANDY STORY. * It was in these little ways that Esther betrayed her feline nature. She played with herself as a cat plays with a mouse, and like the cat, too, she never fora moment entertained the idea of letting herself escape. ———— ect | ae | Another reason, or pair of reasons, combined to further her present delay. The bang over her left temple needed recurling and the iron did not readily heat, and her tailor-made dress was not tied back tight enough ; her movement was too free and untrammeled. But at last both of these defects were remedied, and now there was nothing to do but to go downstairs. She went. Carlton was very glad. \ He was still standing. To tell the truth, he had worn the bloom off several expectant attitudes, and now that she was come, she caught him leaning forward over a small table as if he were about to address a meeting. | With rare tact she ignored this, and gliding forward with as much ease as the tapes on her | underskirt would allow, she put out both hands in the pretty foreign fashion that a summer in New | Jersey had imparted. “ How do you do?” she said, simply. To Carlton, in his present mood, this question seemed complex, and it was with a sort of fine discouragement that he replied : “Ah, thanks; fairly.” There was a pause, Carlton felt that the crisis was rapidly approaching. How should he meet her next question? There was one way to postpone it, and he seized it. He would interro- gate himself, “You expected me ?” he said, catechizingly. “Oh, no,” she replied, lying quickly and sweetly. Carlton was still on the ragged edge. He waited. So did she. . Meantime the gas in the chandeliers burned brightly on at the rate of $1.85 per thousand, and through the closed double-windows came ever and anon the hoarse cry of a newsboy yelling “Extry !” “Extry!” over a bundle of first-edition afternoon papers that he had got stuck on. To this day the smell of gas makes Carlton choke, and he never hears that cry of “ Extry” without feeling a disposition to kick the crier. But in the shrimp-pink parlor that night he did neither. He only waited. Esther was the first to return to her muttons, as it were. In soft confusion over her delayed hospitality, she now murmured : “Will you not sit down?” Carlton glanced at her. She was not looking his way, for she had crossed from behind the table to a low fauteuil that encumbered the drawing-room nearer the fireplace. When she reached it she paused a moment, kicked her skirts eastward, and then bending a little forward from the waist up, she sank gently upon the upholstered plush. Then she turned and looked at Carlton. He did not know that with all her care she had broken a strap, and-she knew that he did not know. The silence deepened and grew. It must have been fully ten feet long and almost as thick before Carlton’s decision was taken. Then he acted promptly. He put his hat and cane upon the table, turned away from them, and bracing himself for the effort, took the two or three short steps necessary to cover the distance to the fireplace, and then, having previously noticed that an arm-chair covered a small hole in the rug to the left of the grate, he rapidly, but with a degree of stiffness readily apparent, seated himself therein, exhaling as he did so a deep breath of relief. Esther caught herself wondering if it were the first or third strap that had given way. But Carlton was not satisfied. At the moment of actual contact with the chair he had heard a sudden thud in the region of his waistband, and now, as he sank deeper into its London smoke cushions, it dawned painfully upon him that his suspender button had come off. Philip H. Welch. (oe UNDEFGRADUATE ARROGANCE. T° what unreasonable lengths college students will go when given a free foot, has just been shown by the action of the Senior class at Columbia College. A memorial fireplace costing $500 was designed and tendered to the Board of Trustees; and simply because that august body declined to receive it, but expressed a willingness to accept a $2,500 memorial, the students declined to give anything. Students are getting to be entirely too high-handed, and if it were left to LIFE to settle, no member of the present Senior class at Columbia should be given a degree until he had left a $5,000 memorial behind him: This trifling with a vener- | able body, such as is the Board of Trustees of Columbia, should be nipped in the bud, if the College has to increase the tuition fee to defray the cost of nipping. comicbooks.com