Page:C Q, or, In the Wireless House (Train, 1912).djvu/171

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“C. Q.”; or, In the Wireless House

hair tonic. She had no objection to this, and in fact rather enjoyed it. It was one of the misfortunes or prerogatives (whichever way you choose to regard it) of being a public character.

She had glanced through an article on how to dress alluringly on seven hundred dollars a year and had stigmatized the author as a pernicious fool. Dress on seven hundred a year? Why, no woman could be decent on less than seven thousand! Then she had skipped over a Yiddish dialect story laid in the lower East Side of New York City and written by a young woman who had never been east of Denver, to sip here and there the sweet insipidity of a love affair in which flossy girls with trim, athletic figures and strong-jawed, manly young men, clean shaven and clad in lower Broadway ready-made suits, dallied together towards legitimate matrimony—although the reader was always in a delicious uncertainty—on yachts and at “Cabarets” in the Tenderloin, along the elm-shaded walks of marvelous Long Island estates, or in the “gun rooms” of English castles. It was very amusing, this mixture of fluff and folly, of lingerie and love, in which the most

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