Women I'm Not Married To

WOMEN I’M NOT MARRIED TO
BY FRANKLIN P. ADAMS
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1922
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY IN THE UNITED STATES AND GREAT BRITAIN PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. TO MRS. FRANKLIN P. ADAMS BUT FOR WHOM THIS BOOK MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN WRIT- TEN, BUT FOR WHOM IT WAS

“Whene’er I take my walks”—you know The rest—“abroad,” I always meet Elaine or Maude or Anne or Flo, Belinda, Blanche, or Marguerite; And Melancholy, bittersweet, Sets seal upon me when I view— Coldly, and from a judgment seat— The women I’m not married to.
Not mine the sighs for Long Ago; Not mine to mourn the obsolete; With Burns and Shelley, Keats and Poe I have no yearning to compete. No Dead Sea pickled pears I eat; I never touch a drop of rue; I toast, and drink my pleasure neat, The women I’m not married to!
Fate with her celebrated blow Frequently knocks me off my feet; And Life her dice box chucks a throw That usually has me beat. Yet although Love has tried to treat Me rough, award the kid his due. Look at the list, though incomplete: The women I’m not married to.
My dears whom gracefully I greet, Gaze at these lucky ladies who Are of—to make this thing concrete— The women I’m not married to.
There have been more beautiful girls than Elaine, for I have read about them, and I have utter faith in the printed word. And I expect my public, a few of whom are—just a second—more than two and a quarter million weekly, to put the same credence in my printed word. When I said there have been more beautiful girls than Elaine I lied. There haven’t been. She was a darb. Blue were her eyes as the fairy flax, her eyebrows were like curved snowdrifts, her neck was like the swan, her face it was the fairest that e’er the sun shone on, she walked in beauty like the night, her lips were like the cherries ripe that sunny walls of Boreas screen, her teeth were like a flock of sheep with fleeces newly washen clean, her hair was like the curling mist that shades the mountain side at e’en, and oh, she danced in such a way no sun upon an Easter day was half so fine a sight! If I may interrupt the poets, I should say she was one pip. She was, I might add, kind of pretty.