Gentlemen prefer blondes - Anita Loos [42]
So then supper turned out to be practically the same thing as luncheon only by supper time all of the novelty seemed to wear off. So then I told Henry that I had to much of a headache to go to church again, so Henry and his mother went to church and I went to my room and I sat down and thought and I decided that life was really to short to spend it in being proud of your family, even if they did have a great deal of money. So the best thing for me to do is to think up some scheme to make Henry decide not to marry me and take what I can get out of it and be satisfied.
June 22nd:
Well, yesterday I made Henry put me on the train at Philadelphia and I made him stay at Philadelphia so he could be near his father if his father seemed to take any more relapses. So I sat in my drawing room on the train and I decided that the time had come to get rid of Henry at any cost. So I decided that the thing that discouradges gentlemen more than anything else is shopping. Because even Mr. Eisman, who was practically born for we girls to shop on, and who knows just what to expect, often gets quite discouradged over all of my shopping. So I decided I would get to New York and I would go to Cartiers and run up quite a large size bill on Henry’s credit, because after all our engagement has been announced in all of the newspapers, and Henry’s credit is really my credit.
So while I was thinking it all over there was a knock on the drawing room door, so I told him to come in and it was a gentleman who said he had seen me quite a lot in New York and he had always wanted to have an introduction to me, because we had quite a lot of friends who were common. So then he gave me his card and his name was on his card and it was Mr. Gilbertson Montrose and his profession is a senario writer. So then I asked him to sit down and we held a literary conversation.
So I really feel as if yesterday was a turning point in my life, because at last I have met a gentleman who is not only an artist but who has got brains besides. I mean he is the kind of a gentleman that a girl could sit at his feet and listen to for days and days and nearly always learn something or other. Because, after all, there is nothing that gives a girl more of a thrill than brains in a gentleman, especially after a girl has been spending the week end with Henry. So Mr. Montrose talked and talked all of the way to New York and I sat there and did nothing else but listen. So according to Mr. Montrose’s opinion Shakespear is a very great playwrite, and he thinks that Hamlet is quite a famous tragedy and as far as novels are concerned he believes that nearly everybody had ought to read Dickens. And when we got on the subject of poetry he recited “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” until you could almost hear the gun go off.
And then I asked Mr. Montrose to tell me all about himself. So it seems that Mr. Montrose was on his way home from Washington D. C, where he went to see the Bulgarian Ambassadore to see if he could get Bulgaria to finance a senario he has written which is a great historical subject which is founded on the sex life of Dolly Madison. So it seems that Mr. Montrose has met quite a lot of Bulgarians in a Bulgarian restaurant on Lexington Avenue and that was what gave him the idea to get the money from Bulgaria. Because Mr. Montrose said that he could fill his senario full of Bulgarian propoganda, and he told the Bulgarian Ambassadore that every time he realised how ignorant all of the American film fans were on the subject of Bulgaria, it made him flinch.
So I told Mr. Montrose that it made me feel very very small to talk to a gentleman like he, who knew so much about Bulgaria, because practically all I knew about Bulgaria was Zoolack. So Mr. Montrose said that