I.—Men
Fat, slick, round-faced men, of the sort who haunt barber shops and are always having their shoes shined. Tall, gloomy, Gothic men, with eyebrows that meet over their noses and bunches of black, curly hair in their ears. Men wearing diamond solitaires, fraternal order watchcharms, golden elks’ heads with rubies for eyes. Men with thick, loose lips and shifty eyes. Men smoking pale, spotted cigars. Men who do not know what to do with their hands when they talk to women. Honorable, upright, successful men who seduce their stenographers and are kind to their dear old mothers. Men who allow their wives to dress like chorus girls. White-faced, scared-looking, yellow-eyed men who belong to societies for the suppression of vice. Men who boast that they neither drink nor smoke. Men who mop their bald heads with perfumed handkerchiefs. Men with drawn, mottled faces, in the last stages of arterio-sclerosis. Silent, stupid-looking men in thick tweeds who tramp up and down the decks of ocean steamers. Men who peep out of hotel rooms at Swedish chambermaids. Men who go to church on Sunday morning, carrying Oxford Bibles under their arms. Men in dress coats too tight under the arms. Tea-drinking men. Loud, back-slapping men, gabbling endlessly about baseball players. Men who have never heard of Mozart. Tired business men with fat, glittering wives. Men who know what to do when children are sick. Men who believe that any woman who smokes is a prostitute. Yellow, diabetic men. Men whose veins are on the outside of their noses. Now and then a clean, clear-eyed, upstanding man. Once a week or so a man with good shoulders, straight legs and a hard, resolute mouth....
II.—Women
Fat women with flabby, double chins. Moon-faced, pop-eyed women in little flat hats. Women with starchy faces and thin vermilion lips. Man-shy, suspicious women, shrinking into their clothes every time a wet, caressing eye alights upon them. Women soured and robbed of their souls by Christian Endeavor. Women who would probably be members of the Lake Mohonk Conference if they were men. Gray-haired, middle-aged, waddling women, wrecked and unsexed by endless, useless parturition, nursing, worry, sacrifice. Women who look as if they were still innocent yesterday afternoon. Women in shoes that bend their insteps to preposterous semi-circles. Women with green, barbaric bangles in their ears, like the concubines of Arab horse-thieves. Women looking in show-windows, wishing that their husbands were not such poor sticks. Shapeless women lolling in six thousand dollar motorcars. Trig little blondes, stepping like Shetland ponies. Women smelling of musk, ambergris, bergamot. Long-legged, cadaverous, hungry women. Women eager to be kidnapped, betrayed, forced into marriage at the pistol’s point. Soft, pulpy, pale women. Women with ginger-colored hair and large, irregular freckles. Silly, chattering, gurgling women. Women showing their ankles to policemen, chauffeurs, street-cleaners. Women with slim-shanked, whining, sticky-fingered children dragging after them. Women marching like grenadiers. Yellow women. Women with red hands. Women with asymmetrical eyes. Women with rococo ears. Stoop-shouldered women. Women with huge hips. Bow-legged women. Appetizing women. Good-looking women....
III.—Babies
Babies smelling of camomile tea, cologne water, wet laundry, dog soap, Schmierkase. Babies who appear old, disillusioned and tired of life at six months. Babies that cry "Papa!" to blushing youths of nineteen or twenty at church picnics. Fat babies whose earlobes turn out at an angle of forty-five degrees. Soft, pulpy babies asleep in perambulators, the sun shining straight into their faces. Babies gnawing the tails of synthetic dogs. Babies without necks. Pale, scorbutic babies of the third and fourth generation, damned because their grandfathers and great-grandfathers read Tom Paine. Babies of a bluish tinge, or with vermilion eyes. Babies full of soporifics. Thin, cartilaginous babies that stretch when they are lifted. Warm, damp, miasmatic babies. Affectionate, ingratiating, gurgling babies: the larvÆ of life insurance solicitors, fashionable doctors, Episcopal rectors, dealers in Mexican mine stock, hand-shakers, Sunday-school superintendents. Hungry babies, absurdly sucking their thumbs. Babies with heads of thick, coarse black hair, seeming to be toupees. Unbaptized babies, dedicated to the devil. Eugenic babies. Babies that crawl out from under tables and are stepped on. Babies with lintels, grains of corn or shoe-buttons up their noses, purple in the face and waiting for the doctor or the embalmer. A few pink, blue-eyed, tight-skinned, clean-looking babies, smiling upon the world....
