Brownwell kind of men, so the experiment which every one on earth for
thousands of years has longed to witness, still remains a theory, and
Adrian Brownwell traipsed up and down the earth, in his lavender
gloves, his long coat and mouse-coloured trousers, his high hat, with
his twirling cane, and the everlasting red carnation in his
buttonhole. His absence made it necessary for Molly Brownwell to leave
the sacred precincts of the home many and many a Saturday afternoon,
to go over the books at the _Banner_ office, make out bills, take them
out, and collect the money due upon them and pay off the printers who
got out the paper. But Adrian Brownwell ostentatiously ignored such
services and kept up the fiction about the sacred precincts, and often
wrote scorching editorials about the "encroachment of women" and grew
indignant editorially at the growth of sentiment for woman's suffrage.
On one occasion he left on the copy-hook a fervid appeal for women to
repulse the commercialism which "was sullying the fair rose of
womanhood," and taking "from woman the rare perfume of her chiefest
charm," and then he went away on a ten days' journey, and the foreman
of the _Banner_ had to ask Mrs. Brownwell to collect enough money from
the sheriff and a delinquent livery-stable keeper to pay the freight
charges on the paper stock needed for that week's issue of the paper.
The town came to know these things, and so when Brownwell, who, since
his marriage, had taken up his abode at the Culpeppers', hinted at his
"extravagant family," the town refused to take him seriously. And the
strutting, pompous little man, who referred grandly to "my wife," and
then to "the madame," and finally to "my landlady," in a rather
elaborate attempt at jocularity, laughed alone at his merriment along
this line, and never knew that no one cared for his humour.
So in his early forties Editor Brownwell dried up and grew yellow and
began to dye his mustaches and his eyebrows, and to devote much time
to considering his own importance. "Throw it out," said Brownwell to
the foreman, "not a line of it shall go!" He had just come home from a
trip and had happened to glance over the proof of the article
describing the laying of the corner-stone of Ward University.
"But that's the only thing that happened in town this week, and Mrs.
Brownwell wrote it herself."
"Cut it out, I say," insisted Brownwell, and then threw back his
shoulders and marched to his desk, snapping his eyes, and
demonstrating to the printers that he was a man of consequence. "I'll
teach 'em," he roared. "I'll teach 'em to make up their committees and
leave me out."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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