Quote of the Day (Wolcott Gibbs, on ‘The Most Dangerous Woman in the World’)

“Even now, in the comparative security of a city of seven million people, I sit dreaming of Miss Sellers, the most dangerous woman in the world….Miss Sellers was my reporter, a heritage from my predecessor, and certainly the most successful practical joke of his negligible career. She was a native of Long Island, which, next to being a Jukes, is of course this world's surest guarantee of great peculiarity. She weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, and as a rule she wore a rusty red garment, shapeless and without sleeves, like an old-fashioned nightgown. Her face was large and gray and sparsely bearded, and it glistened continually with perspiration. Her eyes protruded and never winked. Her hair was arranged, Japanese fashion, in a tower of diminishing black buns, which sometimes contained an exhausted flower. On the whole, it is impossible to describe her more graphically than to say that she resembled the late William Jennings Bryan, unkindly made up to play Madame Butterfly.”—New Yorker editor, critic, and humorist Wolcott Gibbs (1902-1958), on an employee at a Long Island weekly newspaper, in “The Huntress,” in Bed of Neuroses (1937)