Life — September 11, 1890 — page 6: what you’re looking at

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

OUR FRESH AIR FUND Before After AS 304. pat yourself on your prosperous back and say ** What a Hlorigus ronth is September to be in the country,” just remember the pale-faced youngsters who have not yet had a chance to get away from the city. A very few dollars will give them what they have needed all summer. More than two thousand children have been sent to the country this season by means of this fund. Previously acknowledged..$6,638 24 | C. A. G .. ay Lou E. E. June. 8 00 | From the Saily and Mabel From the Y. P. E. of Work Paper Doll Pen- W. Springt ny Club... es WHR: secs tuesccose Contribution ata Lecture Ruth, Elsie and Sumners. | before the Keene Al. ONSEN Heights Library Club, Cadet S. B. Arnold... .. E.R. Bellman : Proceeds at an entertain- ment at The Farragut House, Rye Beach. Live's Fresh Air Fund From an Officer of the U. S. Pensacola Eleanor AJ Ames...) Bilhards, Fruitvale, C Freshy Poverty Flat.: GiW oss oi S3888888 SRESRRER “& DIPLOMAT'S DIARY.” J" is already known that Julien Gordon, whose name appears on the title page of “A Diplomat's Diary" (Lippincott’s), is the nom de guerre of Mrs. S. V. Cruger. The secret was hardly kept till the day of publication, and one wonders why a pseudonym was used at all. The story has several pronounced qualities about it which are seldom found in the usual first novel of an ambitious woman, It is, above all, interesting—so that, though you may dislike every character in the tale, you will read it to the end, Moreover, it is intelligent—with the intelligence which comes of experience in strange lands among cultivated people. The reader is conscious that he is not being fed with the immature imaginings of a school-girl whose world has been a village street. Our New England “novelists used to be, and our Southern “novelists " now are developed in this way. The whole deluge of dialect fiction, which has put style in literature into obscurity, and made prominent unimportant people, arose from our provincial delight in contemplating in a mirror the commonplaces of our daily existence. All of which belongs to another sermon. *[ gay panorama of life at St. Petersburg, which is the stage setting for the story, is painted effectively—so that one feels the atmosphere of the place, and catches the chill of its glitter and artificiality. But the general tempera- ture of the book is fervid enough to compensate for this. How the present generation of male lovers will ever live up AN IDEA OF BLISS. T HAVE TOLD THE CLASS ABOUT THE WICKED PLACE PAVED WITH GOOD INTENTIONS, Now WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE HEAVEN 1S PAVED WITH? L. G. (with a delight{nl recollection of a fresh air pic-nic): BANANAS, HAM SAMWICHES, AN’ PIE! Teacher: Now, to the standard of intensity and ardor set for them by the women novelists is a problem which our college presidents must soon tackle. There is nothing in the present curriculum of a liberal education which develops the emotions in this direction. The middle-aged diplomat of this story is drawn to be a very masculine, wily, and self-poised lover; but the com- pleted picture is a woman's man "—a vain and susceptible old sentimentalist whom the silliest girl could catch with chaff, As for Daphne Acton—she is an exceedingly bright and uncomfortable woman of the New England type, modernized. In the old “saleratus biscuit” school of fiction Daphne would have worn plain frocks, would have been flat-chested and delicate, and more modest in her love-making than the modern heroine. But both are essentially alike—ready and willing to sacrifice their own and everybody else's happiness to a whim, a caprice—springing from that form of inherited selfishness which we have been pleased to call a ‘Con- science.” HE characters in the book have a habit of saying things cleverly—which is no doubt a personal habit of the author. For example : “She speaks to him with that mixture of irritability and compunc- comicbooks.com