The Project Gutenberg EBook of Gaslight Sonatas, by Fannie Hurst

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Title: Gaslight Sonatas

Author: Fannie Hurst

Release Date: November 9, 2003 [EBook #10025]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: They walked, thus guided by an obsequious waiter, through a
light _confetti_ of tossed greetings.]

GASLIGHT SONATAS

BY

FANNIE HURST

1918

[Dedication: To my mother and my father]

CONTENTS

I. BITTER-SWEET

II. SIEVE OF FULFILMENT

III. ICE-WATER, PL--!

IV. HERS _NOT_ TO REASON WHY

V. GOLDEN FLEECE

VI. NIGHTSHADE

VII. GET READY THE WREATHS

GASLIGHT SONATAS

I

BITTER-SWEET

Much of the tragical lore of the infant mortality, the malnutrition, and
the five-in-a-room morality of the city's poor is written in statistics,
and the statistical path to the heart is more figurative than literal.

It is difficult to write stylistically a per-annum report of 1,327
curvatures of the spine, whereas the poor specific little vertebra of Mamie
O'Grady, daughter to Lou, your laundress, whose alcoholic husband once
invaded your very own basement and attempted to strangle her in the
coal-bin, can instantly create an apron bazaar in the church vestry-rooms.

That is why it is possible to drink your morning coffee without nausea for
it, over the head-lines of forty thousand casualties at Ypres, but to
push back abruptly at a three-line notice of little Tony's, your corner
bootblack's, fatal dive before a street-car.

Gertie Slayback was statistically down as a woman wage-earner; a typhoid
case among the thousands of the Borough of Manhattan for 1901; and her
twice-a-day share in the Subway fares collected in the present year of our
Lord.

She was a very atomic one of the city's four millions. But after all, what
are the kings and peasants, poets and draymen, but great, greater, or
greatest, less, lesser, or least atoms of us? If not of the least, Gertie
Slayback was of the very lesser. When she unlocked the front door to he