Humorous stories; Washington (State) -- Fiction; Western stories
The opposition now said this was no job for a chamber of commerce; it
had become a simple matter for the police. The civic purity league had
a special meeting at which the rind was peeled off Vernabelle's moral
character, and the following Sabbath one of the ministers gave a hot
sermon in which the fate of Babylon and a few other undesirable residence
centres mentioned in the Bible was pointed out. He said that so-called
Bohemia was the gateway to hell. He never minced his words, not once.
And the Latin Quarter come in for some more shock assaults when the
talk about an intimate theatre in the Bigler barn got out. The regular
theatre was bad enough, said the civic purity league; in fact, they had
started a campaign against that the month before, right after a one-night
engagement of the Jolly Paris Divorcees Burlesque Company, which, I
gathered, had not upheld the very highest standards of dramatic art.
And if the town was going to stand for anything more intimate than this
show had provided, why, it was time for drastic action if any wholesome
family life was to be saved from the wreck.
Feeling ran high, I want to tell you, and a few of the younger set fell
out of the ranks of good old Bohemia--or was yanked out. Luella Stultz's
father, who is old-fashioned, it was said, had give Luella a good licking
for smoking cigarettes, and old Jesse Himebaugh had threatened his
daughter Gussie with the reform school if she didn't stop trying to get
away from it all. Even Beryl Mae's aunt put her foot down. Beryl Mae met
me in the post office one day and says auntie won't let her be a Bohemian
any more, having threatened to take her new ukulele away from her if she
goes to that Latin Quarter another single time; and poor Beryl Mae having
hoped to do a Hawaiian dance in native costume for the intimate theatre,
where it wouldn't be misunderstood!
Things was just in this shape, with bitterness on every side and old
friends not speaking, and the opposition passing the Bohemians on the
street with the frown of moral disgust, and no one knowing how it would
all end, when I hear that Cora Wales has a niece coming from New York to
visit her--a Miss Smith. I says to myself, "My lands! Here's another Miss
Smith from New York when it looks to me like the one we got is giving us
a plenty of the big league stuff." But I meet Cora Wales and learn that
this one's first name is Dulcie, which again seemed to make a difference.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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