Life — July 8, 1920 — page 10: what you’re looking at

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

66 Thoughts on Chiffoniers ‘HE proper management of a chiffo- nier should be included in one of those courses where, for an initial pay- ment of five dollars, a man can become an efficiency monarch in any department of human thought. I suppose there must be chiffoniers, to be purchased for some fabulous amount, where all of the articles connected with one’s person can be seg- regated, each in a special department by itself. It would, no doubt, be a joy to have one of these affairs, but there is a suggestion of effeminacy about this kind of elaboration that makes one pause. Most of our chiffoniers, however, have a special place for shirts, and I have often wondered why some genius never thought of inventing one of these sections long enough to hold a shirt without doubling up the ends. I once passed a rainy day in constructing an claborate series of pasteboard compartments in one of the drawers of my chiffonier—one for col- lars, one for socks, one for handkerchiefs, ete. The department for socks I further divided, so that those of silk might be separated from those of more humble cotton. But alas! for my brief period of bliss—my dream of efficiency was dissi- The Ball-player’s Wife (at her first game): J1M, COME BACK AND PUT THAT BAT WHERE YOU FOUND IT pated by unknown persons who, when the laundry came back, were always getting the socks and handkerchiefs in the wrong places. Then there is the ignoble bottom drawer, to which is delegated the stern duty of “YOUR HONOR, THE JURY THINK THEY COULD AGREE ON A VERDICT QUICKER IF THEY COULD BORROW A OUIJA BOARD” ing the pajamas, those superior enti- ties, from their more strenuous compan- ions, the union suits. To find the upper part of the pajamas in one end and the lower part entirely missing, to be dis- covered later, quite possibly, in the shirt place, underneath several layers—all this is not conducive to one’s midnight se- renity. I have never been able to understand the attraction that chiffoniers have for useless things. All the chiffoniers 1 have had have betrayed this fatal tendency. There is always a drawer, usually a small one at the top, where odds and ends are placed; but the thing is constantly over- flowing, and those useless things that one is always afraid to part with, constantly straying into all of the other sections. I have never owned any chiffonier that had any of honor about dress gloves. No matter how carefully these gloves may be put aw just at the last moment, when the w ing bells are ring- ing, or the tocsin is sounding for the dinner dance your wife is dragging you out to, you look in the place where those gloves were, and find that they are not. It is a great pity that the moral delin- quencies of inanimate objects cannot be corrected by proper discipline. If I could put my hair brushes and combs through a manual of arms, what a comfort always to find them at their stations on top of my chiffonier, instead of absent without leave, while a dozen other aliens have squatted there without right of occupa- tion! There ought also to be some way of sense comicbook§fecm