This story occurs under the blue skies and
bluer laws of Puritan New England, in the
days when religion was still taken seriously
by a great many people, and in the town of
Plymouth where the "Mayflower'', having
ploughed its platitudinous way from Holland,
had landed its precious cargo of pious Right
Thinkers, moral Gentlemen of God, and—
Priscilla.
Priscilla was—well, Priscilla had yellow
hair. In a later generation, in a 1921 June,
if she had toddled by at a country club dance
you would have noticed first of all that glorious
mass of bobbed corn-colored locks. You
would, then, perhaps, have glanced idly at her
face, and suddenly said "Oh my gosh!'' The
next moment you would have clutched the
nearest stag and hissed, "Quick—yellow hair
—silver dress—oh Judas!'' You would then
have been introduced, and after dancing nine
feet you would have been cut in on by another
panting stag. In those nine delirious feet you
would have become completely dazed by one
of the smoothest lines since the building of the
Southern Pacific. You would then have borrowed
somebody's flask, gone into the locker
room and gotten an edge—not a bachelor-dinner
edge but just enough to give you the
proper amount of confidence. You would
have returned to the ballroom, cut in on this
twentieth century Priscilla, and taken her and
your edge out to a convenient limousine, or
the first tee.
It was of some such yellow-haired Priscilla
that Homer dreamed when he smote his lyre
and chanted, "I sing of arms and the man'';
it was at the sight of such as she that rare Ben
Johnson's Dr. Faustus cried, "Was this the
face that launched a thousand ships?'' In all
ages has such beauty enchanted the minds of
men, calling forth in one century the Fiesolian
terza rima of "Paradise Lost'', in another the
passionate arias of a dozen Beethoven
symphonies. In 1620 the pagan daughter of
Helen of Troy and Cleopatra of the Nile happened,
by a characteristic jest of the great
Ironist, to embark with her aunt on the "Mayflower''.
Like all girls of eighteen Priscilla had
learned to kiss and be kissed on every possible
occasion; in the exotic and not at all uncommon
pleasure of "petting'' she had acquired
infinite wisdom and complete disillusionment.
But in all her "petting parties'' on the
"Mayflower'' and in Plymouth she had found no
Puritan who held her interest beyond the first
kiss, and she had lately reverted in sheer boredom
to her boarding school habit of drinking
gin in large quantities'' a habit which was not
entirely approved of by her old-fashioned
aunt, although Mrs. Brewster was glad to
have her niece stay at home in the evenings
"instead'', as she told Mrs. Bradford, "of
running around with those boys, and really,
my dear, Priscilla says some of the
funniest
things when she gets a little er—`boiled', as
she calls it—you must come over some evening,
and bring the governor.''
Mrs. Brewster, Priscilla's aunt, is the ancestor
of all New England aunts. She may
be seen today walking down Tremont Street,
Boston, in her Educator shoes on her way to
S. S. Pierce's which she pronounces to rhyme
with hearse. The twentieth century Mrs.
Brewster wears a highnecked black silk waist
with a chatelaine watch pinned over her left
breast and a spot of Gordon's codfish (no
bones) over her right. When a little girl she
was taken to see Longfellow, Lowell, and
Ralph Waldo Emerson; she speaks familiarly
of the James boys, but this has no reference
to the well-known Missouri outlaws. She
was brought up on blueberry cake, Postum
and "The Atlantic Monthly''; she loves the
Boston "Transcript'', God, and her relatives
in Newton Centre. Her idea of a daring joke
is the remark Susan Hale made to Edward
Everett Hale about sending underwear to the
heathen. She once asked Donald Ogden
Stewart to dinner with her niece; she didn't
think his story about the lady mind reader
who read the man's mind and then slapped
his face, was very funny; she never asked him
again.
