"
She could not quite give up. She read Kipling, with a great deal of
emphasis:
There's a REGIMENT a-COMING down the GRAND Trunk ROAD.
He tapped his foot to the rhythm; he looked normal and reassured. But
when he complimented her, "That was fine. I don't know but what you
can elocute just as good as Ella Stowbody," she banged the book and
suggested that they were not too late for the nine o'clock show at the
movies.
That was her last effort to harvest the April wind, to teach divine
unhappiness by a correspondence course, to buy the lilies of Avalon and
the sunsets of Cockaigne in tin cans at Ole Jenson's Grocery.
But the fact is that at the motion-pictures she discovered herself
laughing as heartily as Kennicott at the humor of an actor who stuffed
spaghetti down a woman's evening frock. For a second she loathed her
laughter; mourned for the day when on her hill by the Mississippi
she had walked the battlements with queens. But the celebrated cinema
jester's conceit of dropping toads into a soup-plate flung her into
unwilling tittering, and the afterglow faded, the dead queens fled
through darkness.
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