The Lees of Happiness

If you should look through the files of old magazines for the first years of the present century you would find, sandwiched in between the stories of Richard Harding Davis and Frank Norris and others long since dead, the work of one Jeffrey Curtain: a novel or two, and perhaps three or four dozen short stories. You could, if you were interested, follow them along until, say, 1908, when they suddenly disappeared.

When you had read them all you would have been quite sure that here were no masterpieces — here were passably amusing stories, a bit out of date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a dreary² half hour in a dental office. The man who did them was of good intelligence, talented, glib³, probably young. In the samples of his work you found there would have been nothing to stir you to more than a faint interest in the whims⁴ of life — no deep interior laughs, no sense of futility⁵ or hint of tragedy.

After reading them you would yawn and put the number back in the files, and perhaps, if you were in some library reading-room, you would decide that by way of variety you would look at a newspaper of the period and see whether the Japs had taken Port Arthur. But if by any chance the newspaper you had chosen was the right one and had crackled open at the theatrical⁷ page, your eyes would have been arrested and held, and for at least a minute you would have forgotten Port Arthur as quickly as you forgot Chateau⁸ Thierry. For you would, by this fortunate chance, be looking at the portrait of an exquisite⁹ woman.

Those were tie days of “Florodora” and of sextets, of pinched-in waists and blown-out sleeves, of almost bustles¹⁰ and absolute ballet skirts, but here, without doubt, disguised as she might be by the unaccustomed stiffness and old fashion of her costume, was a butterfly of butterflies. Here was the gayety of the period — the soft wine of eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie

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