Yet we think there is something in it. There is no way of assessing the operations of other people’s minds. But we are inclined to think that very possibly the pure happiness we experience in Mr. Santayana’s calm, humorous, disillusioned, and poetic reveries is not essentially different from the cheerful exaltation some young woman feels reading either of the Mrs. Porters in the Y. W. C. A.
MADONNA OF THE TAXIS
Speaking of commuting, the Long Island Railroad owes us $7, and we are wondering how long it will take us to collect it.
The incident, tragic as it was, will prove a lesson to us never again to be unfaithful to our beloved Brooklyn.
On Wednesday evening we had to decide whether we would take the train for Salamis from the Penn. Station or from Brooklyn. We decided we would take it from Penn. Station, because we were without reading matter, and knew that at Penn. Station we could stop in at the bookshop in the Arcade and get something to amuse us en route. All began merrily. We got to the station at 9 o’clock, bought an Everyman edition of Kit Marlowe’s plays, and, well supplied with tobacco, we set sail on the 9:10 vehicle. How excellent are the resources of civilization, said we to ourself, as we retraced the sorrows of Dr. Faustus. Here we are, we cried, sitting at ease in a brilliantly lighted smoker reading “Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,” and in fifty minutes we will greet again the shabby but well-loved station at Salamis. We even meditated writing a little verse in Marlowe’s own vein, to be called “The Passionate Long Islander to His Love”:
Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
That Patchogue, Speonk, Hempstead fields,