Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of AlternativesMoore, Frank Frankfort
General
Priscilla and Charybdis: A Story of Alternatives
Moore, Frank Frankfort
Fiction
The month was August, and no war worth the salary of a special
correspondent was going on, so the newspapers were only too pleased to
open their columns to the communications of the usual autumnal faddists,
and the greatest of these is the marriage faddist. “The Curious
Case” formed the comprehensive heading to a daily page in one paper,
containing letter after letter, from “A Spinster,” “One Who Was
Deceived,” “Once Bitten Twice Shy,” “True Marriage,” “I Forbid the
Banns,” and the rest of them. Without actually commenting on the case,
these distinguished writers pointed out day by day how the various
points in the curious case of Marcus Blaydon and Priscilla Wadhurst bore
out the various contentions of the various faddists. Now this would not
have mattered so much but for the fact that it was the most ridiculous
of these letters which, after a column’s advocacy of the principles
of free love or some other form of profligacy, such as the “Spiritual
Union,” or the “Soul to Soul” wedding, invariably wound up by a
declaration that “all honour should be given to that brave little woman,
who has thrown in her lot with the man she loves, to stand or fall by
the principles which she has so fearlessly advocated”--these principles
being, of course, the very principles whose enunciation formed the
foundation of the ridiculous letter.
The most senseless of all these letters was signed “Two Souls with but
a Single Thought;” and the superscription seemed an appropriate one,
for the writers did not seem to have more than a single thought between
them, and this one was erroneous.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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