Life — November 9, 1928 — page 17: what you’re looking at

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

MRS. PEP’S DIARY Ocroser 17 —A wake be- by umes, threatening my hus- Baird band with divorce if he do Leonard not, whilst he is telephoning at my writing table, cease sribbling and drawing pictures on what- ever memoranda of mine are at his hand, Lord! all my unanswered letters are of futuristic figures and we have not presented a wedding card in months which has not had on its reverse a rough sketch of a cottage with smoke coming out of its chimney. Then on the telephone with Terence Holliday to tell him that sone of the Keith Preston books he has sent me contains the verse about Shad- rch, Meshach and Abednego, which I do wish to send Mistress Hastings in ex- change for the one she told me beginning, “Methuselah ate what he found on his plate,” but there was this quatrain in one of the volumes which pleased me: “Among our literary scenes, Saddest this sight to me: The graves of little magazines That died to make verse free." To luncheon at Tella Brown's, of sweetbreads and mushrooms, fried homi- ayand a romaine salad, very fine, and she dd tell me how she had been reared under the Victorian influence which tught a child to be afraid of everything and how as a young married woman she had lined her three children up every aight before they went to bed and gone though this ritual: “If a runaway horse came towards you down the street, what would you do?” “Get behind a tree, Mama!" “If you were alone in the house aed it caught fire, what would you do?” “Roll in a rug, Mama!” etc. Dinner at bome with Sam, reading afterwards in “The Star-Spangled Manner,” by Bever- ky Nichols, a book in which the author's conceit dues outstrip anything that ever Tread in my life, and I do hear that in a previous work he has set down an inter- view which he had with George Moore, #01 shall seck it out at my earliest oppor- tunity, for it should indeed .be a case of when Greek meets Greek. Octoser 18—This day very warm, with fies about the house in such numbers that ¥e were obliged to get out the swatters, ad my husband, poor wretch, so querul- “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile! smile! smile!” ous because of the humidity that there was small living with him, so that I did ask him please to treat me as if I were fifteen years younger than he, instead of only three, whereupon we fell to talking of this and that, in especial what we re- gretted most not having done in life, and Sam did say that he thought he was sorri- est for not having visited Yama Farms before Prohibition, but, being thoroughly feminine and living mainly in the present, my own lament was that I could not go to the Clarks’ polo luncheon last week and sit next Will Rogers, as our host had planned for me to do. To the shops, buy- ing ice picks, hat stands, orange juice strainers and similar articles whose lack can completely derange my domestic ma- chinery. To tea with Jack and Mildred Rogers, and Jack did tell me how a female client of his had urged him strongly a few days ago to buy immediately as much Fox Films as he could swing, and how he had told her that he would look into it as soon as he returned from snatching a hasty luncheon bite, and when he got back to his office the stock had gone up seven points, so that he figured his gluten toast sandwich had cost him three or four thousand dollars. Dinner at Marge Booth- by’s new penthouse flat, everything so smartly done that it was difficult to credit her tale of having run so short of finger- bowls last night that she was obliged to use one of the bathroom soap dishes. A SELL-OUT Box Orrice Crerk: I want some two- cent stamps. Post Orrice Crerk (about to tear them off sheet): How many? Box Orrice Crerk: I'll take the three front rows, comicbooks.com