THE VEGETABLE
or
from President to postman

This is the “living” room of Jerry Frost’s house. It is evening.The room (and, by implication, the house) is small and stuffy—it’san awful bother to raise these old-fashioned windows; some of themstick, and besides it’s extravagant to let in much cold air, herein the middle of March. I can’t say much for the furniture, either.Some of it’s instalment stuff, imitation leather with the grainpainted on as an after-effect, and some of it’s dingily,depressingly old. That bookcase held “Ben Hur” when it was abest-seller, and it’s now trying to digest “A Library of theWorld’s Best Literature” and the “Wit and Humor of the UnitedStates in Six Volumes.” That couch would be dangerous to sit uponwithout a map showing the location of all craters, hillocks, andthistle-patches. And three dead but shamefully unburied clocksstare eyelessly before them from their perches around the walls.

Those walls—God! The history of American photography hangs uponthem. Photographs of children with{4} puffed dresses and depressingleers, taken in the Fauntleroy nineties, of babies with toothlessmouths and idiotic eyes, of young men with the hair cuts of ’85 and’90 and ’02