قراءة كتاب Tea-Table Talk
تنويه: تعرض هنا نبذة من اول ١٠ صفحات فقط من الكتاب الالكتروني، لقراءة الكتاب كاملا اضغط على الزر “اشتر الآن"
TEA-TABLE TALK
By JEROME K. JEROME
Author of “Paul Kelver” . . . .
“Three Men in a Boat,” etc., etc.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
ON PLATE PAPER BY
FRED PEGRAM . . .
LONDON
HUTCHINSON & CO.
PATERNOSTER SQUARE
1903
PRINTED BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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Who would be a chaperone? |
Frontispiece |
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He would fling himself on his knees before her, never noticing the dog |
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I left them at it |
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He went with her and made himself ridiculous at the dressmaker’s |
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Why should we seek to explain away all the beautiful things of life? |
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Are we so sure that art does elevate? |
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The artist knew precisely the sort of girl that ought to be there |
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A man’s work ’tis till set of sun, but a woman’s work is never done! |
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Does the lady out shopping ever fall in love with the waiter at the bun-shop? |
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Woman has been appointed by Nature the trustee of the children |
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Comparing himself the while with Molière reading to his cook |
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The singer may be a heavy, fleshy man with a taste for beer |
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It is the fool who imagines her inhuman |
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It seized a natural human passion and turned it to good uses |
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She suggested that poets and novelists should take service for a year in any large drapery or millinery establishment |
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Who is it succeeds in escaping the law of the hive? |
I
“They are very pretty, some of them,” said the Woman of the World; “not the sort of letters I should have written myself.”
“I should like to see a love-letter of yours,” interrupted the Minor Poet.
“It is very kind of you to say so,” replied the Woman of the World. “It never occurred to me that you would care for one.”
“It is what I have always maintained,” retorted the Minor Poet; “you have never really understood me.”
“I believe a volume of assorted love-letters would sell well,” said the Girton Girl; “written by the same hand, if you like, but to different correspondents at different periods. To the same person one is bound, more or less, to repeat oneself.”
“Or from different lovers to the same correspondent,” suggested the Philosopher. “It would be interesting to observe the response of various temperaments exposed to an unvaried influence. It would throw light on the vexed question whether the qualities that adorn our beloved are her own, or ours lent to her for the occasion. Would the same woman be addressed as ‘My Queen!’ by one correspondent, and as ‘Dear Popsy Wopsy!’ by another, or would she to all her lovers be herself?”
“You might try it,” I suggested to the Woman of the World, “selecting, of course, only the more interesting.”
“It would cause so much unpleasantness, don’t you think?” replied the Woman of the World. “Those I left out would never forgive me. It is always so with people you forget to invite to a funeral—they think it is done with deliberate intention to slight them.”
“The first love-letter I ever wrote,” said the Minor Poet, “was when I was sixteen. Her name was Monica; she was the left-hand girl in the third joint of the crocodile. I have never known a creature so ethereally beautiful. I wrote the letter and sealed it, but I could not make up my mind whether to slip it into her hand when we passed them, as we usually did on Thursday afternoons, or to wait for Sunday.”
“There can be no
