The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck A Comedy of Limitations

Excerpt

PART ONE - PROPINQUITY

  "A singer, eh?… Well, well! but when he sings
  Take jealous heed lest idiosyncrasies
  Entinge and taint too deep his melodies;
  See that his lute has no discordant strings
  To harrow us; and let his vaporings
  Be all of virtue and its victories,
  And of man's best and noblest qualities,
  And scenery, and flowers, and similar things.

  "Thus bid our paymasters whose mutterings
  Some few deride, and blithely link their rhymes
  At random; and, as ever, on frail wings
  Of wine-stained paper scribbled with such rhymes
  Men mount to heaven, and loud laughter springs
  From hell's midpit, whose fuel is such rhymes."

PAUL VERVILLE. Nascitur.

At a very remote period, when editorials were mostly devoted to discussion as to whether the Democratic Convention (shortly to be held in Chicago) would or would not declare in favor of bi-metallism; when golf was a novel form of recreation in America, and people disputed how to pronounce its name, and pedestrians still turned to stare after an automobile; when, according to the fashion notes, "the godet skirts and huge sleeves of the present modes" were already doomed to extinction; when the baseball season had just begun, and some of our people were discussing the national game, and others the spectacular burning of the old Pennsylvania Railway depot at Thirty-third and Market Street in Philadelphia, and yet others the significance of General Fitzhugh Lee's recent appointment as consul-general to Habana:—at this remote time, Lichfield talked of nothing except the Pendomer divorce case.

And Colonel Rudolph Musgrave had very narrowly escaped being named as the co-respondent. This much, at least, all Lichfield knew when George Pendomer—evincing unsuspected funds of generosity—permitted his wife to secure a divorce on the euphemistic grounds of "desertion." John Charteris, acting as Rudolph Musgrave's friend, had patched up this arrangement; and the colonel and Mrs. Pendomer, so rumor ran, were to be married very quietly after a decent interval.

Remained only to deliberate whether this sop to the conventions should be accepted as sufficient.

"At least," as Mrs. Ashmeade sagely observed, "we can combine vituperation with common-sense, and remember it is not the first time a Musgrave has figured in an entanglement of the sort. A lecherous race! proverbial flutterers of petticoats! His surname convicts the man unheard and almost excuses him. All of us feel that. And, moreover, it is not as if the idiots had committed any unpardonable sin, for they have kept out of the newspapers."

Her friend seemed dubious, and hazarded something concerning "the merest sense of decency."

"In the name of the Prophet, figs! People—I mean the people who count in Lichfield—are charitable enough to ignore almost any crime which is just a matter of common knowledge. In fact, they are mildly grateful. It gives them something to talk about. But when detraction is printed in the morning paper you can't overlook it without incurring the suspicion of being illiterate and virtueless....