Life — July 14, 1910 — page 24: what you’re looking at

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

The Literary Lady What motley cares Corilla’s mind perplex, Whom maids and metaphors conspire to vex! In studious dishabille behold her sit, A lettered gossip and a household wit; At once invoking, though for different view Her gods, her cook, her milliner and muse Round her strewed room a frippery chaos lies, A checkered wreck of notable and wise; Bills, books, caps, couplets, combs, a varied mass, Oppress the toilet and obscure the gla: Unfinished, here an epigram is laid, And there a mantua-maker's bill unpaid; There, new-born 4 foretaste the town’s applause, here, dormant patterns pine for future gauze. A moral essay now is all her care, A satire next, and then a bill of fare. A scene she now projects, and now a dish Here Act the First, and here Remove the Now, while this cye in a fine frenzy rolls, That soberly casts up a bill for coals; Black pins and daggers in one leaf she sticks, And tears and threads and bowls and thimbles mix. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Miss Albina McLush + ON. 2, WILLIS, I have a passion for fat women. If there is anything I ¢ in life it is what dainty people call a spirituelle. Mo- tion—rapid_ motion: smart, quick, squirrel-like step, a pert, voluble tone-—in short, a hvely girl—is my exquisite horror! [ would as lief have a diable petit dancing his infernal hornpipe on my cerebellum as to be in the room with one. [| have tried before now to school myself into liking these parched peas of humanity. [ have followed them with my eyes and attended to their rattle till Iw: as crazy as a fly ina drum. I have danced with them and romped with them in the country, and periled the salva- tion of my “white tights" by sitting near them at supper. I swear off from this moment. I do, | won't—no—hang me if I ever show another small, lively, spry woman a civili Albina MeLush is divine. of the Persian beauty by Hatz: er cyes are full of sle ush, my old college chum, who, as carly ar, was chosen president of the Dolce Niente Society—no member of which was ever known to be surprised at anything—(the college law of rising before Lurly introduced me to his sister ng upon a heap of turnips, lean- ing on his elbow with his head in his hand, in a green lane in the suburbs. He had driven over a stump and been tossed out of his gig, and I came up just as he was won- dering how in the D—I's name he got there! Albina sat quietly in the gig, and when [ was presented, requested me, with a delicious drawl, to say nothing about the adven- ture—it would be so troublesome to relate it to everybody! I loved her from that moment. Miss McLush was tall, and her shape, of its kind, was perfect. It was not a fleshy She is like the description rt is full of pas. one exactly, but she was large and full. Her skin was clear, fine-grained and transparent; her temples and forehead perfectly rounded and polished, and her lips and chin swell- ing into a ripe and tempting pout, like the cleft of a bursted apricot. And then her eyes—large, liquid and sleepy—they languished beneath their long black fringes as if they had no business with daylight—like two magmificent dreams sur- prised in their jet embryos by some bird-nesting cherub. Oh! it was lovely to look into them! She sat usually upon a fauteuil, with her large, full arm imbedded in the cushion, sometimes for hours without stir- ring. I have seen the wind lift the masses of dark hair from her shoulders when it seemed like the coming to life of a marble Hebe—she had been motionless so long. She was a model for a goddess of sleep as she sat with her eyes half closed, lifting up their superb lids slowly as you spoke to her, and dropping them again with the deliberate motion of a cloud when she had murmured out her syllable of assent. Her figure in a sitting posture presented a gentle declivity from the curve of her neck to the instep of the small, round foot lying on its side upon the ottoman. I remember a fellow bringing her a plate of fruit one even- ing. He was one of your lively men—a horrid monster, all right angles and activity. Having never been accus- tomed to hold her own plate, she had not well extricated her whole fingers from her handkerchief before he set it down in her lap, As it began to slide slowly towards her, her hand relapsed into the muslin folds, and she fixed her eye upon it with a kind of indolent surprise, drooping her Iids gradually till, as the fruit scattered over the ottoman, they closed entirely and a liquid jet line was alone visible through the heavy lashes. There was an imperial indiffer- ence in it worthy of Juno. Miss MeLush rarely walks. When she does it is with the deliberate majesty of a Dido. Her small, plump feet melt to the ground like snowflakes, and her figure sways From a_ seventeenth tury drawing representing a discussion between a Projector (or promoter) and a Patentee, a world-wide subject for contention, “On a broad side, entitled as above, is a woodcut, which has a pig's f fox's cars, screws for legs and fish hooks for fingers, bears a measure of coal and a barrel of wine on his Te " —Cat. of * Prints and Drawings,” British Museum. comicbooks.com