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WOMEN’S FRIVOLITY

What most women want to-day is a donkey-load of Paris dresses for their bodies, an automobile to pull them around, an army of servants to hook them up and then to unhook them. The mammonism of men to-day is the outer and physical embodiment of the inner and essential vulgarity of the whole pleasure-loving mob of women on the avenues, with their sipping of cocktails at the beginning of the meal in great restaurants, their flashing of jewels, their parade of gowns, their killing of time through bridge and games of chance. Killing time! When these golden hours are more precious than the purple drops of paradise itself. Oh, these superficial, frivolous, vapid women, who have turned their beautiful bodies into something scarcely better than the wire stands that exhibit gowns in merchants’ windows. And they use their very beauty as exemption from duty!—N. D. Hillis.

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Wonders of Nature—See [Insects of Remote Times].

WONDERS UNSEEN BY MAN

The insect must see a whole world of wonders of which we know little or nothing. True, we have microscopes, with which we can see one thing at a time if carefully laid upon the stage; but what is the finest instrument that can be produced compared to that with twenty-five thousand object-glasses, all of them probably achromatic, and each one a living instrument, with its own nerve-branch supplying a separate sensation. To creatures thus endowed with microscopic vision, a cloud of sandy dust must appear like an avalanche of massive rock fragments, and everything else proportionally monstrous.—W. Mattieu Williams, “Science in Short Chapters.”

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Word, Effect of a Tender—See [Heart-hunger, Satisfying].

WORD IN SEASON