The Argosy, Vol. 81, No. 4 — page 173: what you’re looking at

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

the A’s. There can be no doubt about that. It begins with A, of course, and ends with §S, or, in other words, $. It is a fashionable illness, intimately connected with expensive operations, trips to swell watering resorts, private sana- toriums, French poodles, limousine motor- cars and bulletins signed by specialists of national repute, who write their names one under the other erage properly belongs in in this manner. Appendicitis, belonging in the A family, is naturally associated with those who are Affluent, Aristocratic and Arrogant. Now and then an ordinary American citizen with twelve dollars in the savings bank falls heir to an attack of appendicitis; whereupon a matter-of-fact hospital surgeon with cig- arette stains on his fingers, skilfully sepa- rates the citizen from his vermiform annoy- ance and remarks to the patient, when he can talk again, that life in a hospital is a horrible bore. Teronne Metcalf was an ordinary young woman and an orphan, who never had a bank account, large or small, and who had _worked for three years in the Sinclair store. She was tall and good-natured, and her a aN Nee PA Tees AD » -t “ Z; ZZ * ae SF CZ rank Con eyes were dark-brown, with a flash of blue and the merest trace of gray. She sold French lingerie to young women who could not afford it, and fat, elderly ladies who no longer could afford not to afford it. She often wondered, as she stood upon weary feet behind her piled- up counter, how some people could be as wealthy as Mr. Sinclair, her employer, and others so poor as Teronne Metcalf herself. Not finding an answer, she worked on cheerfully, and the other girls openly ad- mired her unfailing good humor. Then Mr. P. Appendicitis came hurrying into the store one spring morning, paused before the French lingerie department and remarked to Teronne that she was wanted at the hospital. It was one of those sud- den attacks. The ambulance backed up to a side entrance and Teronne was carried out by two uniformed young men from the hospital, one of whom had nice eyes and told her not to worry. And two days later Teronne opened her eyes and realized that, no matter how long she lived in this world, she would never again walk down Broadway in full posses- sion of her appendix. She was as abso- lutely appendixless as McGuffey’s First Reader. ‘“My Lord!” remarked Teronne to the 739 CORMICLOOOKS (C@)