Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
"Middle name is Cynic--but he's pretty young yet."
"And the best looking thing," sighed Edwina pulling on her gloves,
bored with her long silence.
Graemer was thoughtful.
"He's given me an idea," he announced suddenly. "Or perhaps it was
Tom's gossip about him. How'd you like to do an ingenue part like that
missing lady affair--start with your head over a garden wall--call it
'The Heart of a Boy,' say--fill it up with this stuff Hamilt calls
youth--"
Tommie absorbed his last pastry.
"I've just remembered the girl's name," he announced, wiping a crumb
from his moist lips. "It was Felicia something or other--sort of sad,
wasn't it?"
"Maybe it would have been sadder if she'd married him," suggested
Edwina ironically. "He is a grouch, you can't get around that."
And the grouch, striding briskly up the avenue, was trying to be fair.
"Poor old Tommie!" he thought ruefully, "I don't know why I should go
on hating him because he will blab--it's the nature o' the beast--that
stupid little much-divorced animal that married him--" he glared at
two innocent young shoppers who were passing, "Gad, women are such
sophisticated cows nowadays--" Spring always made him wretched, spring
always made him fretful, spring always sent him off for the woods
somewhere, any woods so long as it was woods. He pondered over whether
he could get away Friday or would have to wait till Saturday morning,
and eventually decided on Saturday, consulting a memorandum book
scowlingly as he did so, jotting down appointments. He noted that he
would have to be in his office at five o'clock on Friday. Somebody or
other was going to telephone him about something. Which made him
reflect irritably that of all the mechanical devices of a mechanical
age the thing he hated most of all was a telephone! He could scarcely
endure the stupid way everybody shrieked "Hello!" through it. He
wished morosely that he could take a week-end trip without any luggage
whatever because he always had a row about his luggage. He wished
there was some system whereby one needn't always lose half one's
luggage.
Felicia could have told him! Infrequent traveler that she was she had
been properly educated on that point. However much she may have
yawned, at the tender age of ten, over a certain dissertation on the
etiquette of travel, given one summer afternoon by Mademoiselle
D'Ormy, Felicia aged twenty-seven, embarked upon her first journey
alone, found herself musing with mighty comfort upon the charming
definiteness of those never-to-be-forgotten axioms. For Mademoiselle
had made the small Felicia recite them over and over until she was
letter perfect.
"On a journey the traveler should enumerate all the traveling
equipment in fives to avoid the confusion caused by losing one's
belongings. Count upon the fingers what one has possessed upon
starting."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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