She tore the wrapper from a Sunday issue of a famous metropolitan
daily and flaunted its comic supplement at me. "That's how I always
think of New York," said she--"a kind of a comic supplement to the rest
of this great country. Here--see these two comical little tots standing
on their uncle's stomach and chopping his heart out with their
axes--after you got the town sized up it's just that funny and horrible.
It's like the music I heard that time at a higher concert I was drug to
in Boston--ingenious but unpleasant."
But this was not what I would sit up for after a hard day's
fishing--this coarse disparagement of something the poor creature was
unfitted to comprehend.
"Ben Sutton," I remarked firmly.
* * * * *
"The inhabitants of New York are divided fifty-fifty between them that
are trying to get what you got and them that think you're trying to get
what they got."
"Ben Sutton," I repeated, trying to make it sullen.
"Ask a man on the street in New York where such and such a building is
and he'll edge out of reaching distance, with his hand on his watch,
before he tells you he don't know.
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