putterings 418 < 419 > 420 index
over test-tubes and crucibles, no woman anywhere
For — women! there was no sheik-stuff in Nol’s limp fragility. Ridge looked back over all those thin gray years and saw the Chase’s ugly duckling puttering near-sightedly over test-tubes and crucibles, no woman anywhere. Only that damned hussy whom Nol had hoped to marry and who had run away from him with another man. And then, six months after the arrival of Aunt Pittman’s fortune — Venus!
ex Virginia Tracy, The Moment After (1930) : 124
google books preview snippet : link
The book is dedicated to Hettie Gray Baker (“Not forgetting anything”)
(1880-1957), librarian, scenarist, film editor, writer, aelurophile
wikipedia : link
see also Marsha Gordon’s profile of Hettie Gray Baker at the Women Film Pioneers Project : link
Baker was editor for the silent historical film Nero (1922, since lost), directed by J. Gordon Edwards, and written by Charles Sarver and Virginia Tracy. That film ( 120 minutes in length, “6,500 people in the cast” * ) was filmed in and around Rome.
wikipedia : link
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Virginia Tracy (1874-1946), stage (and cinema) actress, screenwriter, essayist, novelist
wikipedia : link
This is Tracy’s second appearance in these putterings — see also “the gray stage, the gray” : 140.
Some of her earlier writing is conveniently available via The Unz Review : link