“Maria, who had heard the last words, said: ‘Yes, I should think one could find pleasanter topics of conversation, Jimmie.’”
The trouble was that within a day or two four little boys, friends of Jimmie’s, with their arms around each other’s necks, insisted on marching up and down the street chanting in a derisive sing-song:
“Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,
Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen,
Mr. and Mrs. Domen and Ab Domen.”
They were audible even while Mrs. Baker, very flushed and angry, called on Mrs. Preston, desiring her to Take Steps. The passage along the street of the fat little Baker boy occasioned loud cries of “Here comes Ab! Hello, Ab! There’s Ab Domen!” We will only say further of this diverting and entirely truthful episode that it had an amazing sequel.
Jimmie, who cannot be convicted of having conspired to fasten upon young Edward Baker a nickname at once refined and unusual, was more or less responsible, we fear, for his aunt’s finding herself unable to open the bathroom door after he had repaired and oiled all the locks in the house. He was blameless of the thefts of what the family called “nether undergarments” from the neighbors’ clotheslines. Here Maria played detective, though the discovery of the culprit was mostly luck.
We may laugh over these things in a book and learn the better to laugh over them in life, even when we are cast for the uncomfortable rôles in their enaction. But we should not like to be the reader who may laugh at such chapters as those which tell of young Osborn’s first attachment to the ideal, as embodied in a certain Miss Fairweather, some years older than he.
This is a book which takes its place with the best of Tarkington and with the earlier Howells. For breadth of understanding, accuracy of observation, fidelity of reporting it is not easy to think of an American novel that transcends it.
Mrs. Vorse was born, in New York, Mary Marvin Heaton, daughter of Hiram Heaton and Ellen Cordelia (Blackman) Heaton. She was educated abroad. She was married on October 18, 1898, to Albert White Vorse, and, secondly, in 1912, to Joseph O’Brien. She is correctly Mrs. Joseph O’Brien.
Books by Mary Heaton Vorse
The Breaking-In of a Yachtsman’s Wife, 1908.
The Very Little Person, 1911.
The Autobiography of an Elderly Woman, 1911.
The Heart’s Country, 1913.
The Ninth Man.
The Prestons, 1918.