Argosy All-Story Weekly — "The Purple Limited" — page 55: what you’re looking at

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

JUNGLE LOVE. nature induces a kindly simplicity. The friction of artificial township often pro- duces a mischievous and heartless cruelty. Julie was now six weeks out from a Brooklyn dock, and Artie, representing the moving, culminating factor of invited but unsuspectedly knavish circumstance, had jerked her out of her job, her rooming- house, and stranded her high and dry on the shell-strewn coast of Brazil. It had been an unpremeditated flight, and a hard, disconcerting fall. As a reflex from the bump that signified she had stopped moving, Julie’s nerves were still jerking to a rag, and mow was the time to sit down and review the past, take stock, ‘and. think. ; Think! There was the trouble. Julie found it easy enough to sit corporally lax and still; but she mest decidedly did not know how to control her thoughts to a lucid, ordered pace or sequence. Her brain, trained to the seizure of a predetermined occurrence; set and nicely keyed to the furtherance of scheduled commonplace hap- penings, was-still awhirl with a dizzy, night- marish phantasmagoria of new and upset- ting experience. Five or six weeks of travel, preceded by events that were still greatly shrouded in mystery to her, were crammed pellmell into the closet of jumbled memo- ries. The moment Julie tried to hitch her- self to the beginning of the wild carouse of doings that had followed her. first meeting with Artie Falwell, the gnome manipulating the record of her scrappy, pictured thoughts, went crazy. _ At times the ribbon of mental photo- graphs that started with the first glimpse of the man who had swept her off her un- stable equilibrium, sped too fast for her to ‘seize on any one blurred memory. Then, with erratic inconsequence, the film would slow up, and with dirgelike persistence, Julies thoughts would cluster round some disconcerting, sordid scene. She had court- ed adventure, and lacking the discriminat- ‘ing salt of experience, found herself wofully disillusioned with a crop of misadventures. Her emotions were sunburnt and writhing helplessly under a searing rash of prickly self-pity. For Julie there was no philoso- phic unguent compound of calm, stand- ~ 621 aside, impersonal view of herself. She had no power to glimpse the humor that always clings to the heels of trouble and tragedy and urges courage by impish mockery of futile tears. - Some unhappy ones there are, who, how- ever straight their circumstance and deep their trouble, cannot hurl W. E. Henley’s defiant barrages at onward, rushing fate. They cower and. wilt at the rumble of the storm. They flee when the winds of ad- versity flippantly shred their self-complais- ance. As we know, Julie had her fair share of vanity, her modicum of positive knowledge regarding the promiscuous attractions of her femininity. She knew the charm of a glance from her downcast, heavy-lashed, blue eyes. She could gage with a fair de- gree of accuracy, the effect, on some men, of the pathetic droop to her full, red lips. She knew the pulling quality of a semi- veiled curve, the appeal of a daintily shod, arched instep; but being still unaware that she had a soul to be preserved in supreme control of the physical Julie, she very natur- ally couldn’t acclaim her captaincy over her own destiny. To think was an effort, and she was quite ready to drift and allow events to direct her course. There was a paucity of quality in the emotions experienced by Julie. The stirring of old memories irked her, the finer chords of feeling remained undisturbed. She had existed in a world of give and take where shades of meaning and sensitive dis- tinctions went unasked, unheeded, and un- recognized. No one had made for her any sacrifice that she was aware,of and for no one had she had the joy of small martyr- dom. No favors had been asked and none given. Wrong had been intended toward her, but no great harm had resulted. Her life had been lacking in any perceptible dimension of friendship of comradely inter- est or love. By force of circumstances had the evil sufficiency of each day’s impotency in her development held sway until the moment when she had sought opportunity under the wrong banner. For Julie there had been no mother to scold and gently love. No evenings round © the family table with father fiking the room CONIC DOO S CO