“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)
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