FUN

=i=

One way to write about Nina Wilcox Putnam would be in the way she writes
about everything. It's not so hard. As thus:

Some dull day in the office. We look up and whom should we see standing
right there before us but Nina Wilcox Putnam! Falling over backwards, that
being what our swivel chair is made for, we say: "Well, well, well! So
today is May 3, 1922! Where from? West Broadway?"

"I should not say so! South Broadway, I guess. I've just motored up from
Florida. But your speaking of West Broadway reminds me: I've written a
piece for George Lorimer of Saturday Evening Post. You see my book, _West
Broadway_, brought me so many letters my arm ached from answering them.
What car did you drive? Where d'y' get gas in the desert? What's the best
route? And thus et cetera. So now I have wrote me a slender essay
answering everything that anybody can ask on this or other
transcontinental subjects. Mr. Lorimer will publish, and who knows--as
they say in fiction--it might make a book afterward."

"How's Florida?"

"I left it fine, if it doesn't get in trouble while I'm away. I've bought
a ranch, for fruit only, on the East Coast, between Palm Beach and Miami,
but not paying these expensive prices, no, not never. And I shall live
there for better but not for worse, for richer, but most positively not
for poorer. I pick my own alligator pears off my own tree unless I want to
sell them for fifteen cents on the tree. Bathing, one-half mile east by
motor."

"Been reading your piece, 'How I Have Got So Far So Good,' in John
Siddall's American Magazine."

"Yes, I thought I would join the autobiographists--Benvenuto Cellini,
Margot Asquith, Benjamin Franklin, et Al, as Ring Lardner would insist. Do
you know Ring? He and I are going to have one of these amicable literary
duels soon, like the famous _Isn't That Just Like a Man? Oh, Well, You
Know How Women Are!_ which Mrs. Rinehart and Irvin Cobb fought to a
finish. But speaking of sport, I have discovered my grandest favourite
sport, in spite of motoring, which is deep sea fishing, nothing less. Let
me inform you that I landed a 9-pound dolphin which he is like fire-opals
all over and will grace the wall of my dining-room no matter if all my
friends suffer with him the rest of their lives. He was a male dolphin;
get that! It makes a difference from the deep sea fishing sportsman's
standpoint. And this place of mine at the end of South Broadway where I
can roll cocoa