Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1919-07-02
THE CHAFFING DISH


carriages would be provided. and if any of
the club members were compelled to remain
in town over the week end they could take
the children for an airing in the park.
AJAX: This is brave idea, Socrates
And then. when all the children were bedded
for the night, how would the domestic at
mosphere be simulated?
SOCRATES: Nothing simpler. After
dinner such husbands as are accustomed to
washing the dishes would be allowed to do so
in the club kitchen. During the day it would
be the function of the matron to think up
! number of odd jobs to be performed in the
course of the evening. Pictures would be
hung, clocks wound number of tin cans
would be waiting to be opened with refrac-
tory can openers, and there would always be
several window blinds that had gone wrong
a really resourceful matron could devise any
| number of ways of making the club seem
just like home. One night she would discern
smell of gas, the next there might be a hole
in the fly screens, or little carpentering to
do, or caster broken under the piano. HIS
bands with a turn for plumbing would find
the club basement perpetual place of
solace, with fresh leak or a rumbling pipe
every few days.
AJAX: Admirable. And il the matron
really wanted to make the members feel at
! home she would take a turn through the
building every now and then, to issue gentle
rebuke for cigar ashes dropped on the rugs
| or feet elevated on chairs.
SOCRATES: The really crowning touch,
| l think, would lie in the ice box raids. A
| large ice box would be kept we'll stocked
with reminders of apple pie, macaroni, stewed
prunes and chocolate pudding. Any hus-
| band, making q cautious inroad upon these
about midnight would surely have the au-
| thentic emotion of being in his own home.
AJAX: An occasional request to empty
the ice box pan would also be an artful echo
| of domestcity.
SOCRATES: OF course the success Of the
scheme would depend greatly on finding the
right person for matron. If she were to
strew few harpins about and perhaps mis-
| place a latch key now and then
AJAX: Socrates, you have hit upon
| great idea. But you ought to extend the
| membership of the club to include young men
not yet married Think what an admirable
| training school for husbands it would make
| SOCRATES: My dear fellow, let us not
discuss it any further. 1t makes me too
homesick. I am going back to my lonely
apartment to write a letter to dear Xanthippe.
The incense of your vanished blood and
| breath
Within the amber spaces of the night,
Cool as child love and dark as very death,
Is still my one and bittersweet delight
Those ghostly tapers hold the fume of you
Wreathing this quaint, impalpable reward,
The twined perfume of one so falsely true,
Wherewith the dark was subtly spiced and
starred
For gone that crown of pale, reluctant gold,
And those white hands that rose like chords
and fell.
Oh, you, so gravely young, so gayly old,
J. High lamp of Heaven and spark of sheerest
| Hell:
Who but 1, Bittersweet, have understood
Your gentle evil and your valiant good?
RICHARD DESMOND.
Mr. Maurice Weyl has been kind enough
to send us a copy of his novel, ''The Choice
which has just been published
The first thing we always do to a new book
is to smell it, and we can tell by the fra
grance of the paper that Mr.. Weyl's book is
one we shall greatly enjoy.
But why, we wonder, does the publisher
say on the jackef'rt is an American novel
that might have been written in England -
| Surely the old gag about English literary
superiority is wearing little thin?
We prefer to look forward to the day when
a New York; publisher will print on the
Jacket of book: "It is an American novel
that might have been written in Philadel-
phia. = SOCRATES,