Life — December 28, 1928 — page 25: what you’re looking at

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

Tue Fracman: Come on—take a chance—you might make it. MRS. PEP’S DIARY by Decemper 5—Lay late, pon- “y dering on last night’s play, Baird “Holiday,” a piece with some Leonard highly diverting lines and acted with refreshing ama- teurish gusto, but methought they did hammer too much at the theme, which is that leisure is mere valuable to. youth than to age, an idea certainly not new to me, and one of which I have so far taken a shameless advantage. Lord! it does seem 1am always reading books or witnessing dramas struggling to put over preach- ments which I have practiced for years without talking about them. To luncheon with Elisabeth Thomas, through traffic so thick that the chauffeur did address me about it, and glad I was that Sam was not there to hear him for that he does unjustly accuse me of a childish beam which invites the conversation of perfect strangers. This driver did wrathfully hold the motor manufacturers responsible for the congestion of our streets through turning out cars 30 cheap that anybody with one hundred dollars may own one, making me very complacent about the prosperity of my appearance, and silent as to the humble make of our own chariot. Found Mistress Nathalie Colby, the novel- ist, at E.’s, and we did make a fine meal off fruit, chops, peas and my favorite luncheon or supper salad, which is tomato | aspic with apples and celery mayonnaise, with properly chilled floating island for a sweet, and the talk was the best and most congenial I have heard in a long time. Reading all the evening in a book called “The Velvet Hand,” containing four mys- tery stories as absorbing and well wrote as ever I read in my life, so that I did long for a few minutes to be a detective like Madame Storey, but Lord! what could not criminals put over on a woman who cannot find even her own notebooks and walking-stick? December 6—Breakfast betimes, reading the publick prints and wondering, when the sum totals of great estates are pub- lished, whence come the seventeen or forty-one cents that always end up the millions. A box come from my mother this morning containing my first dress, my grandmother’s wedding fan, my great- grandfather’s snuff box and many similar relics, including two bibs of my infancy which I should well be wearing now against the huge bills which I do contract with dry cleansers. And as for the baby caps, I daresay that my elders did not dream, as they tied the ribbons under my chin, that one day I should be such a zany as repeatedly to lay out forty dollars for a piece of millinery which I liked well enough in the shop but hated after wear- ing it home. To luncheon at France Tyler's, and we had first a hot and well- sauced egg, and then bits of veal cutlet wrapped in bacon with mashed potatoes and string beans, and a fine puff pastry with apricot sauce, and there was much talk of Argentina, the dancer who is hav- ing such vogue amongst us at present, but I have no mind to go to sce her, since I do never remember the “Maine” so acutely as when Spanish dancing begins. Bill Fan- shawe did tell how a presentable college youth of her acquaintance had been dele- gated by the president of his university to meet at a train the current and dis- tinguished Sir Walter Raleigh, who was coming to lecture to the students on archaeology, and how the boy had ap- proached the traveler who best answered the description he had been given and asked him if he were Sir Walter Raleigh, whereto the stranger, regarding him gravely, replied, “No, I am Addison Sims of Seattle. Sir Walter Raleigh is still in the diner playing tiddle-de-winks with Queen Elizabeth.” In the late afternoon to the house of Mr. Nast, the publisher, for the great wedding reception of his son and Miss Brown, and so home, very weary, and to bed before dinner. comicbooks.com