Twin Tales: Are All Men Alike, and, The Lost TitianStringer, Arthur
General
Twin Tales: Are All Men Alike, and, The Lost Titian
Stringer, Arthur
Canadian fiction
“But I’m not interested in the streets and the mail-directory numbers,”
Teddie patiently explained. “What I’ve been talking about is the spirit
of the place, its aura.”
“Yes, I got a sniff of it as I came through that Italian settlement,”
acknowledged Uncle Chandler. “And it was quite a penetrating aura.”
“But you’re only croaking out of a swamp of prejudices,” contended
Teddie. “You don’t understand our ways of living or looking at life. You
try to gauge Greenwich Village, which was once good enough for Poe and
Masefield, by Fifth Avenue standards, and you get your numbers mixed.”
She looked up at him with a more commiserative light in her earnest
young eyes. “But if you want to see us as we are, why not take chow with
me at the Blue Pigeon to-night?”
“Not muchee!” averred Uncle Chandler, with great alacrity. “I’ve
altogether too much respect for my Fifth-Avenuey Little Mary. I’ve seen
’em before, those futuristic smoke-boxes with a tinned sardine rolled up
in a pimento-skin and _Mimis_ from Waterbury and up-State Villons who
muss their hair and get mixed up on the garlic and free-verse. So, much
as I love you, Teddie, I’ll toddle along to my benighted old Nasturtium
Club and deaden my soul on Green Turtle clear and Terrapin, Philadelphia
style, and breast of Chicken _Fincise_ with sweet potatoes Dixie, and
new peas _Saute_, and an ice and coffee to end up with.”
Teddie tried to look indifferent. But it took a struggle. For her Uncle
Chandler had rather disdainfully picked up an oblong of cardboard and
sat inspecting it with a none too approving eye.
What he inspected was a crayon sketch of an extremely muscular right arm
and shoulder, a right arm and shoulder which at least demanded some
qualified respect. But his grizzled old eyebrows were closer together as
he looked up at Teddie again.
“Did you say you drew from models?” he casually inquired.
“Of course,” acknowledged Teddie, pausing long enough to answer her
telephone and explain that she and not the landlord had ordered the new
glass for the skylight.
“You don’t mean to say you have men come up here and—and expose their
muscles for this sort of thing?” demanded Uncle Chandler, with a gesture
toward the ample biceps in crayon.
Teddie laughed.
“Oh, no, that wasn’t a professional model. That’s the arm of Gunboat
Dorgan, the prize-fighter. I sketched that the other afternoon when he
was up here with Ruby Reamer, one of my regular models. He’s Ruby’s
steady, as she calls it. She’s very proud of him, and had him showing me
some of his stunts. So I thought it would be a good chance to get a
study of an arm like that. And Gunnie—that’s what Ruby calls him—isn’t
a bit like what I thought a prize-fighter would be. He’s rather a
bright-minded boy, and a little shy, and if he wins the lightweight bout
from Slim Britton, the English boxer, he’s going to marry Ruby and take
a flat down on Second Avenue.”
“But you say he’s a fighter, a ring-fighter?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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