Single Blessedness: And Other Observations

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Doubleday, Page, 1922 - American essays - 224 pages
 

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Page 60 - A good musical comedy consists largely of disorderly conduct occasionally interrupted by talk. The man who provides the interruptions is called the librettist. I would advise any man who hasn't the nerve to be a foot-pad or is too large to get through a
Page 171 - —a puzzling combination of shy provincial, unfettered democrat and Fourth of July orator. He is a student by choice, a poet by sneaking inclination, and a story-teller by reason of his nativity.
Page 130 - If you have become so ossified by habit that you cannot put up with the manners and customs and transportation facilities and cooking and cocktails of the older civilizations, the thing for you to do is to stay at home and watch the trains go through.
Page 199 - send for him. He did not seem over-anxious to meet the reporters, and he had a fine contempt for most of the orthodox traditions cherished by the people who loved him. Probably no other American could have lived abroad for so many years without being editorially branded as an expatriate. When Mr. Clemens chose to take up his residence in Vienna
Page 45 - chickens and quail—so plentiful that the hunters brought in wagon loads. We used to tire of quail potpie and long for meat from the butcher's. This is not Saskatchewan or Oklahoma that we are describing. This country of croaking frogs and black mud and myriad flocks of wild fowl was so near Chicago that one
Page 122 - have a nervous collapse before leaving home, or is that hunted look the result of recreation? From what size town do they hail? What do they think of the natives hereabouts? And what do the natives hereabouts think of them? Well, a good many of them are sappy, that's a fact; but I would rather be a woozy tourist than a
Page 2 - by that famous old highway known as "The Primrose Path." 3d. It is the duty of every student of history and economics to help perpetuate the species and protect the birth rate. These are the damning accusations. Any representative woman's club, anywhere, would bring in a verdict of "guilty" against a notorious bachelor, in two minutes,
Page 13 - come the bachelors! Now, if you persistently represent single blessedness as seated in a huge leather chair, with Wilkins bringing whisky and soda, and a married woman of incredible attractiveness waiting to call him up on the 'phone, you need not be surprised if, in time, the whole social organization is permeated with a grotesque misconception of the true status of the bachelor. For years
Page 3 - listening to witnesses. The moment a man marries, the indictment is quashed. For the time being, he is snow white. A little later, after the divorce proceedings, he may become speckled, but he never sinks quite back to the degraded estate of bachelorhood. He tried to be a good citizen.

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