The silly season is rather delayed in Shanghai e during the hottest of the days we simply haven't energy enough to be foolish. It takes high spirits and considerable leisure and a spice of adventure to be inspiredly idiotic, as we really were back in Iowa Genter in those first warm June nights when girls would come back to our house after canoeing on the lake and talk over the different men in the party and what they would amount to ten years from then and our own secretest dream and LIFE—all in capitals you know.
Summer brings extra leisure out here, or would if it didn't mean so many extra baths and so much careful attention to electric fans and cold drinks. My mother would-n't have recognized me, I was so sensible, staying home nights, going to bed early, plodding through my work at the office! But now that there's a hope of fall in the air and one can bear to think about clothes one can take to frivolity again with renewed zest. Summers in Shanghai (I've known hardly one) are something like the "retreats" made by the spiritually minded who wish to get away from the allurements of the world.
But, as we were saying, the thermometer has fallen and our spirits are rising; Madge is beginning to plan entertainments, and I'm surveying the shop windows, which is one of the fist symptoms of the shopping fever. We've met some rather amusing girls lately and some of them talk delicious nonsense. Its rather a pity one doesn't have time for lady friends when the season is actually on, because women among themselves seem to be much more humourous than when mere men are about and you have to adjust your jokes to their intelligence. " Men—even Shanghai men—require a good deal of mothering! Some day, when I've been bitterly disappointed in love, or have had smallpox, or lost my front teeth, I'm going to Boston or some inland New England village and just revel in women.
Meantime, the latest is the L. L. It stands for "Lived and Loved" and four of us who have qualified—more or less—started it last night. The requirements for admission are five proposals, or one marriage and 3 Proposals (4 different men of course), or two marriages, or one divorce. The Executive Committee, that's us, will pass on "candidates' eligibility, and unless we are satisfied no one gets by. We can demand proofs, of course, but there are some girls I'd never believe had a proposal, no matter if they showed me five different engagement rings and the same number of trousseaux of different vintages.
If we are not too lazy to have a second meeting I think we could make the club a rather piquant affair, All it takes is nerve, with
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.