The Wasp, 1918 · page 108 of 330
The Wasp — 1918 — page 108: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page contains **prose fiction rather than a cartoon**—it appears to be serialized literary content from the satirical magazine. The passage depicts a melodramatic romantic scene between a character named Stanton and a woman he calls "Kitty," where he comforts her after an encounter with someone named James Burnham. The text itself functions as satire through **overwrought Victorian prose**: the excessively flowery descriptions of the woman ("bright and luxuriant hair...as soft as silk," "pulsing bosom") and the sentimental characterization of Stanton's feelings mock the era's romantic literary conventions. The mention of Stanton's moral virtue—that his "manliness" hasn't yet been "dissipated by stupid and vicious living"—suggests this is satirizing heroic military or society fiction. Without additional context about the magazine's date or the serialized story's arc, the specific identities and references remain unclear, but the satirical intent targets period literature's melodramatic style and romantic idealization.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
THE WASP 99 major, then left her in tears of relief and general ~ nervous agitation, and strode off in search of his Kitty. He found her at last, crouched upon the floor in the corner of an empty room, with her face hidden in her hands. Tears glistened between her white and tapering fingers. Her bright and luxuriant hair, as soft as silk and as rich in tone as the straw of ripe wheat, had _ escaped from its braids and ribbons and now cascaded across her pliant quaking shoulders and over her pulsing bosom. She was small, slender, delicately rounded from crown to heel. Stanton knelt beside her and lifted her in both arms until her small head rested upon his right shoulder and her wonderful tresses streamed over his bright tunic. He loved her. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, according to his own standards of beauty. At that time his infatuation for her was stronger than his passion for play and wine. Such man- _liness as he had been born the possessor of had not yet been dissipated by stupid and vicious living. He tried to comfort her, kissing her wet cheeks and eyelids and whispering into her shell-like ear that she had nothing to fear from James Burnham. He assured her that he had comichooks.com