Life — August 13, 1925 — page 7: what you’re looking at

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

« LIFE ° T he BEING A FURTHER TALE OF WHAT HAPPENED TO A CHARMING PEOPLE, IN AND ABOUT MAYFAIR, WRITTEN DOWN BY MICHAEL ARLEN AND ARRANGED BY WHAT WOULD BE A DANDY ARMENIAN NAME FOR HIM, HERMAN J. MANKIEWICZ ‘OW there was, and it is not so long ago that it could be called long ago by a right-minded man nor so recent that there might be those who would dare to term it recent, a night that a man strode into a room that you would otherwise hi thought was a room not for striding into at all nor, perhaps, even at all a man for strid- ing into rooms. It is ever thus that men and women take revenge upon the barrenness that is their minds by saying of this that it is that and of that that it is this, as if never this could be this nor that that. Whereas, of course, the very greatest of the world arrive at the end of their years and count themselves blessed 1f only they have learned this one thing, that this is never completely this nor that, nor that that nor this, nor a mixture nor an adulteration of this and this nor that and that, but rather something of an entirely dif- ferent sort. But this is this, that this is a poor time for ses while there waits the true, the only account of the man and the room and the strid- ing, though you would say that of the three not any two could have been happily joined. He was a tall man, with such a thing in his face as is only to be found in the English face when it is forty, save it be under or over forty. And it is such a thing that makes the English, who are notoriously not a sentimental race nor a sentimental race, swear to themselves that neither are they sentimental. A man, then, like this man or that, and yet curiously unlike, and at times more like that man or this. He had everything to live for, this man, or so they said—that mysterious they with whom never is there talk but only are they talked about—and so he lived, which is not like those other Englishmen, who have nothing to live for, and so they live too. For was he not—he With Decorations by John Held, Jr. was—rich, like an American stockbroker and an Armenian author and an uncle: and was he not—and he was—handsome, not so that people in the boulevards turned to stare as he passed, but rather so that they let him pass without staring, as they let sunsets and ships and Shelmerdenes pass; and did he not— he did—have a,—but who should add hereto the word wife, as one would say of Napoleon that he had an empire? He had then, Ict it be said, a wife, but let it be further said that it is to the eternal shame of two thousand years of Christian civiliza- tion that it has not yet provided for the lan- guage of the English a means of saying of a beautiful thing that it is beautiful in such way that thereby is reproduced in full that quality that makes of that thing a beautiful thing and not a handsome thing nor a pretty thing nor yet a thing about which there could ever be any who would say aught but that it is a beautiful thing. There have been put into this world a num- ber of methods of behaviour, that we call niceties, nor will you find anywhere those who are not full of praise of them and demand for them, though this is peculiar, for those who call for them most loudly never by any chance will have to do with those who have them to reveal and display, for such people are nice people, and nice people are never nice, for the one thing, chiefly, that they are nice. But this man had no niceties, except in his home, from which it is said a beautiful lady had once fled because of them, and so as he strode into the comicbooks.com