Further Foolishness | Page 3

'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. She is The Wife of the Other Man. Just what there is, for the reader, about other men's wives, I don't understand. I know tons of them that I wouldn't walk round a block for. But the reading public goes wild over them. The old-fashioned heroine was unmarried. That spoiled the whole story. You could see the end from the beginning. But with Another Man's Wife, the way is blocked. Something has got to happen that would seem almost obvious to anyone.
The writer, therefore, at once puts the two snoopos--The Man and The Woman--into a frightfully indelicate position. The more indelicate it is, the better. Sometimes she gets into his motor by