Further Foolishness | Page 3

crushed his cigar against the
brass of an Egyptian tray. 'Bah!' he murmured, 'Is it worth it?' Then he
let his head sink again."
You notice it? He lifted his head all the way up and let it sink all the
way down, and you still don't know who he is. For The Woman the
beginning is done like this: "The Woman clenched her white hands till
the diamonds that glittered upon her fingers were buried in the soft
flesh. 'The shame of it,' she murmured. Then she took from the table the
telegram that lay crumpled upon it and tore it into a hundred pieces. 'He
dare not!' she muttered through her closed teeth. She looked about the
hotel room with its garish furniture. 'He has no right to follow me here,'
she gasped."
All of which the reader has to take in without knowing who the woman
is, or which hotel she is staying at, or who dare not follow her or why.
But the modern reader loves to get this sort of shadowy incomplete
effect. If he were told straight out that the woman's name was Mrs.
Edward Dangerfield of Brick City, Montana, and that she had left her
husband three days ago and that the telegram told her that he had
discovered her address and was following her, the reader would refuse

to go on.
This method of introducing the characters is bad enough. But the new
snoopopathic way of describing them is still worse. The Man is always
detailed as if he were a horse. He is said to be "tall, well set up, with
straight legs."
Great stress is always laid on his straight legs. No magazine story is
acceptable now unless The Man's legs are absolutely straight. Why this
is, I don't know. All my friends have straight legs--and yet I never hear
them make it a subject of comment or boasting. I don't believe I have,
at present, a single friend with crooked legs.
But this is not the only requirement. Not only must The Man's legs be
straight but he must be "clean-limbed," whatever that is; and of course
he must have a "well-tubbed look about him." How this look is
acquired, and whether it can be got with an ordinary bath and water are
things on which I have no opinion.
The Man is of course "clean-shaven." This allows him to do such
necessary things as "turning his clean-shaven face towards the
speaker," "laying his clean-shaven cheek in his hand," and so on. But
every one is familiar with the face of the up-to-date clean-shaven
snoopopathic man. There are pictures of him by the million on
magazine covers and book jackets, looking into the eyes of The
Woman--he does it from a distance of about six inches--with that
snoopy earnest expression of brainlessness that he always wears. How
one would enjoy seeing a man--a real one with Nevada whiskers and
long boots--land him one solid kick from behind.
Then comes The Woman of the snoopopathic story. She is always
"beautifully groomed" (who these grooms are that do it, and where they
can be hired, I don't know), and she is said to be "exquisitely gowned."
It is peculiar about The Woman that she never seems to wear a
_dress_--always a "gown." Why this is, I cannot tell. In the good old
stories that I used to read, when I could still read for the pleasure of it,
the heroines --that was what they used to be called--always wore
dresses. But now there is no heroine, only a woman in a gown. I wear a
gown myself--at night. It is made of flannel and reaches to my feet, and
when I take my candle and go out to the balcony where I sleep, the
effect of it on the whole is not bad. But as to its "revealing every line of
my figure"--as The Woman's gown is always said to--and as to its

"suggesting even more than it reveals"--well, it simply does not. So
when I talk of "gowns" I speak of something that I know all about.
Yet, whatever The Woman does, her "gown" is said to "cling" to her.
Whether in the street or in a cabaret or in the drawing-room, it "clings."
If by any happy chance she throws a lace wrap about her, then it clings;
and if she lifts her gown--as she is apt to--it shows, not what I should
have expected, but a jupon, and even that clings. What a jupon is I don't
know. With my gown, I never wear one. These people I have described,
The Man and The Woman--The Snoopopaths--are, of course, not
husband and wife, or brother and sister, or anything so simple and
old-fashioned as that. She is some one else's wife.