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Next he bestowed his attention upon Mrs. Snyder's mother, a Mrs. Brown, staying in the house to care for small Lorraine, and upon a policeman stationed there at Mrs. Brown's request. The policeman, "infinitely bored, sits all day in the dining-room and studies the comic pictures in a newspaper with the intense gravity of a mathematician tackling a heavy problem. . . . Mrs. Brown's skin has a doughy pallor. She is a large-hipped, blue-eyed, spectacled woman about 60 years of age. Apparently without much education, she is almost inarticulate of speech."
While making these observations, Mr. Woodward engaged Mrs. Brown in conversation. He reported her as saying, "People can stand purty near anything when they have to," and his own apt reply: "They certainly can. I've stood some grand slams myself."
Small Lorraine was eating buttered toast. "She cuddled up against me. . . . 'You'll choke yourself if you don't look out,' I said to her." He asked her it she liked her father and mother. "'. . . Sure. . . And I like you, too.'"
"You're a pretty good liker, aren't you, dear?"
She ignored this sally so Reporter Woodward showed her his watch. The Post's readers learned that he had told her his watch was thin because it was made that way. Thin watches, he had said, are always thin. The Post's readers were informed that refreshing Mr. Woodward's thin watch came from Geneva, Switzerland. The Post's readers were made sure that Loraine's unfortunate intellect was no match for her masterful interrogator's and Mr. Woodward passed on to give the Post public its money's worth of illicit passion— "hot lovers, the throbbing tom-toms of jazz and the tawdry splendor of night clubs . . . the rhythmic beat of heart's desire." He explained the motive for Mrs. Snyder's action — avarice — and, for Salesman Gray's impulse, suggested that "a plausible theory is that he slayed [sic] ... to show his superiority, to prove to his ladylove that he, a real heman. . . ."
Readers of Cyrus Hermann Kotz-schmar Curtis' Evening Post were not just sure that this he-manly "new departure in journalism" was not the most distasteful thing that had appeared in Manhattan since Bernarr Macfadden.
Vanderbilge
Among primitive tribes, when a quarrelsome youngster betrays his clan, mocks and reviles it to a large audience of strangers, the strangers are usually disgusted and show no surprise if the youth's relatives gently strangle him. But civilized society feels differently about strangulation. Civilization is thus to some extent an annoyance to the Vanderbilt family, mocked and reviled as it is in the public prints by its disaffected, loudly yelping, self-martyrizing young member, Cornelius IV.