Constant Reader

being published in those same years, but no one collected the Constant Reader pieces - partly, perhaps, because of the convention of pseudonymity, which would have prevented the use of her name.

p. 19-20 "..."Hence," goes on the professor, "definitions of happiness are interesting." I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: "One of the best" (we are still on definitions of happiness) "was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.'" Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe."

p. 23-24 "...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me?

But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," she says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out."

p. 26-27 "...Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ...
...It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches."

p. 103 "...It's not that she has not tried to improve her condition before acknowledging its hopelessness. (Oh, come on, let's get the hell out of this, and get into the first person.) I have sought, by study, to better my form and make myself Society's Darling. You see, I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock about a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen, but I thought that maybe I might be the girl to start the vogue. I would become brilliant. I would sparkle. I would hold whole dinner tables spellbound. I would have throngs fighting to come within hearing distance of me while the weakest, elbowed mercilessly to the outskirts, would cry "What did she say?" or "Oh, please ask her to tell it again." That's what I would do. Oh I could just hear myself."