RESPECTABILITY IF you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a crea- ture with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This mon- key is a true monster. In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty. Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles. Had you been in the earlier years of your life a citizen of the village of Winesburg, Ohio,there would have been for you no mystery in regard to the beast in his cage. "It is like WashWilliams," you would have said. "As he sits in the corner there, the beast is exactly like old Washsitting on the grass in the station yard on a summer evening after he has closed his office for the night." Wash Williams, the telegraphoperator of Winesburg, was the ugliest thing in town. His -135- |