So at this moment the band begins to make a noise. We perceive at once that the price was accurately gauged. It is unquestionably an eighty-dollar band. We begin to believe in dachshunds.
To these supposedly cheerful strains the gentlemen stream into the drawing-room. They beam repletely. They tell us what a fine luncheon it was. They are eloquent about it. All the conditions of their entertainment were ideal, they would have us believe. They imply that we are mighty lucky, in that our men can provide us with such a luxurious existence. They smile with majestic benignity at these fair, but frivolous pensioners on masculine bounty. American women are petted, helpless dolls, anyway. Foreigners have said so. They clasp our useless hands in fervent farewells. They proceed in state to the waiting cars. They hope we will follow them to the meeting. Oh, yes, we will come, though incapable of apprehending the high problems of government.
Led by the honest band, surrounded by flags, followed by cheers, they disappear in magnificent procession. Now we may straggle to the dining-room and eat cold though matchless oysters, tepid chicken, and in general whatever there is any left of.
The chambermaid has broken a lovely old Minton plate. We are glad we didn't use the coffee-cups that were made in France for Dolly Madison. She would have enjoyed wrecking those.
We hurry, because we don't want to miss the meeting altogether. We think enviously of the men. In our secret souls, we'd like to campaign. We love to talk better than anything else in the world, and we could make nice speeches, too. But we must do the oysters and the odd jobs, and keep the hearth-fires going, like responsible vestal virgins. It's woman's sphere. Man gave it to her because he didn't want it himself.
The Street
By Simeon Strunsky
IT is two short blocks from my office near Park Row to the Subway station where I take the express for Belshazzar Court. Eight months in the year it is my endeavor to traverse this distance as quickly as I can. This is done by cutting diagonally across the street traffic. By virtue of the law governing right-angled triangles I thus save as much as fifty feet and one fifth of a minute of time. In the course of a year this saving amounts to sixty minutes, which may be profitably spent over a two-reel presentation of 'The Moonshiner's Bride,' supplemented by an intimate picture of Lumbering in Saskatchewan. But with the coming of warm weather my habits change. It grows more difficult to plunge into the murk of the Subway.
A foretaste of the languor of June is in the air. The turnstile storm-doors in our office building, which have been put aside for brief periods during the first deceptive approaches of spring, only to come back triumphant from Elba, have been definitively removed. The steel-workers pace their girders twenty floors high almost in mid-season form, and their pneumatic hammers scold and chatter through the sultry hours. The soda-fountains are bright with new compounds whose names ingeniously reflect the world's progress from day to day in politics, science, and the arts. From my window I can see the long black steamships pushing down to the sea, and they raise vague speculations in my mind about the cost of living in the vicinity of Sorrento and Fontainebleau. On such a day I am reminded of my physician's orders, issued last December, to walk a mile every afternoon on leaving my office. So I stroll up Broadway with the intention of taking my train farther up-town, at Fourteenth Street.
The doctor did not say stroll. He said a brisk walk with head erect, chest thrown out, diaphragm well contracted, and a general aspect of money in the bank. But here enters human perversity. The only place where I am in the mood to walk after the prescribed military fashion is in the open country. Just where by all accounts I ought to be sauntering without heed to time, studying the lovely texts which Nature has set down in the modest type-forms selected from her inexhaustible fonts,—in the minion of ripening berries, in the nonpareil of crawling insect life, the agate of tendril and filament, and the 12-point diamond of the dust,—there I stride along and see little.