FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   >>  
sophy of those words. Who said them first, I wonder. "It takes all sorts of people to make a world." That is, if we only had one sort or even a number of sorts we would have no world. To make a world there must be all sorts, including the funniest folks we ever knew. I looked from the sensible woman with her well-chosen clothes to the woman across the way. This second woman was a sort of dressed-up-and-no-place-to-go type, with a squirt of Cashmere Bouquet in the center of her handkerchief. And nothing on that went with anything else she had on. And a hat which one knew was a hat, because it was on her head, otherwise it might have passed for almost anything. The woman beside me wouldn't have been caught dead looking like the second woman. Yet she should have been thankful for her. For it is only by contrast that the well-groomed look smart, and the overdressed look fussy. Whether that is Einstein's theory of relativity or not, I don't know. I only know that, "It takes all sorts of people to make a world." There we sit on parade in these side-seater cars, and what we are is revealed so pitilessly to all who sit across from us. It is as though Fate were making jokes of us and sits us down beside the antitheses of ourselves. Such a one of Nature's jokes I saw recently. They were two men. The first was the sort whom one calls an "old boy." A racy individual, well-fed with a round front, an Elk, of course, a city man, reeking of good cigars, and an appraising eye out for a good-looking woman. Beside him sat a man who had been studying birds in the Park. Berkeley was written all over him. A thin, pure type. He was dressed in field glasses and a bag full of green weeds and stout walking boots. There was an ecstatic glint in his eye which meant that he had discovered a long-billed, yellow-tailed Peruvian fly-catcher, "very rare in these parts." So there they sat packed in so close and so terribly far apart, both so necessary to the making of a world. And as they sat a boy entered the car with a shoe-box, full of holes, and out of the holes came a "peep" and then another. And the Berkeley man lost his abstracted look and the man-about-town laid down his paper and pretty soon the boy lifted the lid a bit and both men peeked in. The Fog in San Francisco Sunsets in the desert, spring in New England, black-green oaks lying on tawny hills in Marin County, fields of cotton on red soil in Georgia, surf on the
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   >>  



Top keywords:

making

 

people

 

dressed

 

Berkeley

 

appraising

 
discovered
 

cigars

 

billed

 

tailed

 

yellow


studying
 

written

 

Georgia

 

ecstatic

 

walking

 

Beside

 

glasses

 
terribly
 

peeked

 

lifted


pretty

 

Francisco

 

Sunsets

 

England

 

County

 

desert

 
spring
 
fields
 

abstracted

 
packed

catcher

 

reeking

 

entered

 
cotton
 

Peruvian

 

handkerchief

 

Cashmere

 

Bouquet

 
center
 

wouldn


caught

 

passed

 

squirt

 

including

 

funniest

 

number

 
clothes
 
looked
 

chosen

 

recently