The Absurdity Is – Just That It Should Be Absurd
By Henry Kitchell Webster
There was no logical reason why she should feel annoyed at the young man taking the vacant seat beside her in the car. So far as she could see, he had nowhere else to sit. He was a perfectly presentable young man—slender, straight, intelligent-looking, perfectly well dressed without being a bit “dressed up.” and, from her point of view, just the right age to make him interesting—three or four years older than she was, for a guess, which would make him twenty-three or -four years old.
His manner, too, would have satisfied the strictest martinet among the teachers at the extremely fastidious finishing school which, last June, had guaranteed her to be a finished product. He made her a very slight bow,—an entirely impersonal concession to civility,—and then. taking no more room than was necessary, sat down, and paid no further attention to her.
That was not why she was annoyed, however. Heaven knew the last thing she wanted, this morning, was a silly quasi-flirtation with a good-looking stranger who might, conceivably, have tried to begin with a show of somewhat warmer concern over having to disturb her, and then, by lowering the window or adjusting the blind for her, pave the way for the beginning of a conversation. It was lucky for the young man that these had not been his tactics.
But the notion that stuck in her mind with such burr-like and irritating persistency was that six months ago, or three, or perhaps even one, she would have been silly enough to like that sort of thing and to hope that it might happen. Nothing like it ever had happened; but she was perfectly aware that, up to not very long ago, she had kept a decorously adventurous eye open for just such an encounter.
It was in an indignant and rather exasperated protest against this memory that she drew herself up a trifle straighter and sat as tight as she could against the side of the car.
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, on 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.
Popularity
He first achieved moderate recognition in 1899 when he co-wrote The Short Line War with fellow Illinois author Samuel Merwin, with whom he later collaborated to write one of his more famous works, Calumet “K” (1901). Calumet “K”, which The Chicago Daily Tribune called “a vivifying romance of business,” has maintained a modest level of popularity due to its status as Ayn Rand’s favorite novel, a source of inspiration for her Objectivist philosophy. Webster’s novels The Real Adventure (1916) and An American Family: A Novel of Today (1918) both received critical praise upon release, and the former novel was made into a silent film in 1922. By the time of his death, Webster had become one of the most popular authors of magazine serials in America, and “was largely instrumental in the great literary revolution of the generation, making best books ‘best sellers’”.
Henry Kitchell Webster
