The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of LifeLewis, Sinclair
General
The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
Lewis, Sinclair
City and town life -- Fiction; Minnesota -- Fiction
"Yes! And the only nice lovable crank I've found--except you, with
your vulgar prejudice against the whole race of authors--is a
dark-eyed female who sits on a couch out in the big room, like a Mrs.
St. Simeon Stylites in a tight skirt, and drags you in by her
glittering eye, looking as though she was going to speak about
theosophy, and then asks you if you think a highball would help her
cold."
"I think I know the one you mean. When I saw her she was talking to a
man whose beating whiskers dashed high on a stern and rock-bound
face.... Thank you, I like that fairly well, too, but unfortunately I
stole it from a chap named Haviland. My own idea of witty
conversation: is 'Some car you got. What's your magneto?'"
"Look. Olive Dunleavy seems distressed. The number of questions I
shall have to answer about you!... Well, Olive and I felt very low in
our minds to-day. We decided that we were tired of select
associations, and that we would seek the Primitive, and maybe even
Life in the Raw. Olive knows a woman mountain-climber who always says
she longs to go back to the wilds, so we went down to her flat. We
expected to have raw-meat sandwiches, at the very least, but the
Savage Woman gave us Suchong and deviled-chicken sandwiches and pink
cakes and Nabiscos, and told us how well her son was doing in his Old
French course at Columbia. So we got lower and lower in our minds, and
we decided we had to go down to Chinatown for dinner. We went, too!
I've done a little settlement work----Dear me, I'm telling you too
much about myself, O Man of Mystery! It isn't quite done, I'm afraid."
"Please, Miss Winslow! In the name of the--what was it--Order of the
Blue Bowl?" He was making a mental note that Olive's last name was
Dunleavy.
"Well, I've done some settlement work----Did you ever do any, by any
chance?"
"I once converted a Chinaman to Lutheranism; I think that was my
nearest approach," said Carl.
"My work was the kind where you go in and look at three dirty children
and teach them that they'll be happy if they're good, when you know
perfectly well that their only chance to be happy is to be bad as
anything and sneak off to go swimming in the East River. But it kept
me from being very much afraid of the Bowery (we went down on the
surface cars), but Olive was scared beautifully. There was the
dearest, most inoffensive old man in the most perfect state of
intoxication sitting next to us in the car, and when Olive moved away
from him he winked over at me and said, 'Honor your shruples, ma'am,
ver' good form.' I think Olive thought he was going to murder us--she
was sure he was the wild, dying remnant of a noble race or something.
But even she was disappointed in Chinatown.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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