putterings 163 < 164 > 165 index
easily shown up, Umm!
escaping
doubly bracing to his sense of superiority.
to rampant reaches where he feared [
]
a subservient puttering about
—
somewhat erasured, ex “Rentin’ Hens” by Florida Pier (with Pictures by F. R. Gruger), The Century Magazine 83:2 (December 1911) : 214-219 (215) (Harvard copy, via hathitrust)
the misread excerpted above from
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign copy (digitized April 23, 2015) : link
same search yields clean text from a different copy
Harvard copy (digitized March 16, 2007) : link
—
the passage, with more context —
These experiments [raising peacocks, raising rabbits], though not productive of the immediate financial ease which Mr. Barnaby had always prophesied, had nevertheless served to lull any disturbing ideas he may have had as to Joan’s running the place [their Maryland plantation, that his daughter labored to keep from “picturesque destitution”] with an over-high hand. With their help he had asserted himself, and if his attempts had failed, the fact that no one dared take him to task was doubly bracing to his sense of superiority. His own activity satisfied him that Joan’s was a subservient puttering about easily shown up at its real value. Six months before, having reached the conclusion that the apparent prominence of women was not cause for serious concern, he had been comfortably relaxed ever since. It was consequently a shock for him to have hurled across a table laden with more food than either of the two diners could possibly eat the announcement that a woman’s suffrage club had been started in the county.
“A suffrage club?” It went like a blow on an exposed nerve through Mr. Barnaby’s whole body.
“Umm!” His daughter nodded her head with Southern slackness. “Ah ’ve been made vice-president.”
—
Florida Pier (1883-1979), later (and better) known as Florida Scott-Maxwell
stage actor, writer (short stories, essays, plays); Jungian psychoanalyst; later wrote of women in midlife, and her experience of old age
wikipedia
Towards Relationship (1939)
Women and Sometimes Men (1957)
The Measure of My Days (1968) : borrowable at archive.org