“I want to use the ‘lightning-bug’ verse,” writes Ursus. “Please reprint it and say to whom credit should be given.”
It is easier to reprint the lines than to locate the credit, but we have always associated them with Eugene Ware. They go—
“The lightning-bug is brilliant, but he hasn’t any mind;
He stumbles through existence with his headlight on behind.”
[p 302]
]The Harmony Cafeteria advertises, “Eat the Harmony Way.” A gentleman who lunched there yesterday counted eighteen sword-swallowers.
Remindful of the bow-legged floorwalker who said, “Walk this way, madam.”
Watching the play, “At the Villa Rose,” our thoughts wandered back to “Prince Otto,” in which piece we first saw Otis Skinner. And we wondered precisely what George Moore means when he says that Stevenson is all right except when he tries to tell a story. According to Moore, a story is not a story if it keeps you up half the night; “it is only the insignificant book that cannot be laid down,” he once maintained.
What is a story? To us it is drama first, operating on character. To Conrad it is character first, being operated on by drama. That may be why we prefer “The Wrecker” to “The Rescue.”
Writes M. G. M. from Denver: “Madame Pompadour, late of Chicago, opened a beauty shop here, and one of our up-to-date young ladies asked her if she was doing the hair in the crime wave so popular in Chicago.”