Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker, Colleen Bresse, Regina Barreca

they’ve had them, and all! That would be nice for the children to see, wouldn’t it? I should think you’d think of the children, Fan. No, sir, there’ll be nothing like that around here, not while I know it. Disgusting!”
    “But the children,” she said. “They’ll be just simply——”
    “Now you just leave all that to me,” he reassured her. “I told them the dog could stay, and I’ve never broken a promise yet, have I? Here’s what I’ll do—I’ll wait till they’re asleep, and then I’ll just take this little dog and put it out. Then, in the morning, you can tell them it ran away during the night, see?”
    She nodded. Her husband patted her shoulder, in its crapy-smelling black silk. His peace with the world was once more intact, restored by this simple solution of the little difficulty. Again his mind wrapped itself in the knowledge that everything was all fixed, all ready for a nice, fresh start. His arm was still about his wife’s shoulder as they went on in to dinner.
     
    American Mercury , September 1924

A Certain Lady
     
    My friend, Mrs. Legion, is one of those few, as tradition numbers them, who are New Yorkers by birth. This gives her an appreciable edge on the parvenus who are Manhattanites only by migration. The Legions occupy an apartment on upper Riverside Drive, in a building called “The Emdor”—an apt and amicable blending of the name of the owner’s wife, Emma, with that of his daughter, Doris. Thus, at one crack, are any possible hard feelings averted, and a happy literary effect achieved. “Isn’t it a cute idea?” Mrs. Legion asks you, when she has explained the origin of the title. “Isn’t it,” you answer, without an interrogation point. And there you both are, ready to start all over again.
    Shortly—oh, anywhere from seven to ten minutes—after she has met you, Mrs. Legion is supplying you with all the ground floor information as to why she lives on Riverside Drive, instead of Park Avenue. There is all the sun they get, and that big kitchen, and the superintendent is so obliging, and just look how convenient the busses are. Not for worlds, she promises you, would she dwell in any other section of the city. Yet, oddly enough—just about enough—she may be found frequently inspecting and pricing Park Avenue apartments, and hopefully calling up real estate agents to inquire if the rents in that part of town have taken a change for the better since her last inquiry.
    Although she lives as far from Park Avenue as it is possible to do and still keep out of Jersey, Mrs. Legion is cozily conversant of all the comings and goings, or what have you, of the Avenue dwellers. Breathlessly she pursues the society notes in the daily papers; promptly on their days of publication she buys the magazines dealing with the activities of the socially elect. Only drop a hat, and she can give you anything you want to know in the way of dates, and maiden names, and who married whom, and how they are getting along, if any. She employs nicknames, in referring to members of the favored few hundred, with an easy casualness that gives her remarks a truly homey flavor.
    Naturally, it eats into her time to keep so admirably posted on these matters. And Mrs. Legion is pretty hard pressed for time. You might think, with her husband earning a cheery income, with Junior and Barbara safely in school, and a pleasant sufficiency of maids—two will do it nicely—around the apartment, that Mrs. Legion’s life would follow the course made celebrated by the proverbial Riley; but the days are all too short for her to complete her business. She is always late for her appointments, rushing in a bit breathless, almost embarrassingly apologetic for those things that lack of time has forced her to leave undone. You simply must excuse the way she looks, but she didn’t have a minute to get her hair waved, or, goodness, she must try to crowd in a manicure somehow, or for heaven’s sake, remind her to