The Absurdity Is – Just That It Should Be Absurd
By Henry Kitchell Webster
Or perhaps—this had been rather a favourite plot of hers—you were so beautiful and so clever that you were considered heartless. You fell in love with a very noble and serious young man, who at first believed you to be only a frivolous-minded society girl. But at last, when by chance he found out how kind you were to the poor, he passionately begged your forgiveness for having so cruelly wronged you. You did forgive him, of course. And lived happily ever after.
She could see now that her belief in the Christmas tree had begun to get shaky a good while ago. But it had needed last night’s storm to blow it down. The storm had raged for two hours in her father’s library, beginning, naturally enough, with the question of her allowance. Her allowance was ten dollars a month—just pin-money, of course. All her clothes and hats and things went indistinguishably into the monthly bills. But the ten dollars had proved painfully inadequate even as a lubricant. She had got further and further behind, drawing upon him or her mother, whichever had seemed more promising, to make up her deficiency.
Now, out of a clear sky, her father had taxed her with gross extravagance. Any sort of rebuke from him would have cut deep enough; the thing was so unprecedented as to be almost paralyzing. But to be accused of extravagance, when she all the while had been pluming herself upon the nobility of a hundred little economical sacrifices, was more than she could bear. She didn’t begin to keep up her end with other girls—her former school friends. Why, one little matin�e party, or a downtown luncheon for three or four of them, would take a whole month’s allowance. She was a victim, a hitherto uncomplaining victim, of her father’s parsimony!
Genre: Romance Books | Short Story
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Henry Kitchell Webster
Henry Kitchell Webster (September 7, 1875 – December 8, 1932) was an American who was one of the most popular serial writers in the country during the early twentieth century. He wrote novels and short stories on themes ranging from mystery to family drama to science fiction, and pioneered techniques for making books best sellers.
Personal life
Henry Kitchell Webster was the oldest child of Chicago industrialist Towner K. Webster and Emma Josephine Kitchell. He graduated from Hamilton College in 1897 and taught rhetoric at Union College the following year. Otherwise, he lived most of his life in Evanston, Illinois. He married Mary Ward Orth, September 7, 1901. In 1910, after his earliest novels achieved success, he and Mary traveled around the world. The couple had three sons; Henry Kitchell Jr. (1905), Stokely (1912) who became a well-known impressionist painter, and Roderick (1915), who was Chairman of Adler Planetarium and benefactor of its Webster Institute. In 1922, the family spent a year living and traveling in Europe. They rented an apartment on the Rive Gauche in Paris, during which time Stokely studied painting with a family friend, the American artist Lawton S. Parker. Webster was friends with many actors and opera stars, including Ethel Barrymore who starred in his 1912 Broadway play June Madness.
In 1930, Webster wrote a memoir of his father which was published by his brother-in-law Walter A. Strong. In the summer of 1932, Webster was diagnosed with cancer. He died the following December at the age of 57. At the time of his death, Webster had partially completed a mystery, The Alleged Great-Aunt. His wife gave the manuscript to his friends Janet Ayer Fairbank and Margaret Ayer Barnes, who completed and published it in 1935.
Henry Kitchell Webster
