In the past when Mr. Knight was plainly visible on a clear evening weaving rich sarabands among the palsied wealthy of New York's night clubs (“It is my proud boast that I have never been seen anything but drunk in those fetid cribs”), his attacks upon his father- in-law and other victim types were circulated in the form of modest feuilletons hastily apostrophized on a mimeographing machine. Life with Dorothy is elegantly printed in book form, with printer's ornaments in the form of pink elephants, and substantially bound in boards.
Mr. Knight is at odds with a variety of people ranging from Henry Luce to Mrs. Irving Berlin. It would be inexpedient here to illustrate the Knight treatment of people of whom he is not inordinately fond, but the following will give you an idea of his appraisal of a lady to whom he is, by his own admission, devoted.
“I have also remaining to me at least one friendship in Dallas which keeps me squatting squarely in the top-flight society of that Dimple of the Southwest. If you ever find yourself doing a split- week in the Dimple and you meet Mrs. Gracie Dexter Burgher, I urgently conjure you to please her. It will not only be pleasanter for you but, on the whole, safer. What I mean is that if anyone came running up to me and said a saber-toothed tiger was about to hop Mrs. Burgher, I would just yawn and say, `Who cares what happens to a saber-toothed tiger?'”
This will give you an idea. People whom Mr. Knight has not liked have frequently taken up residence in Antofagasta or even changed their names.
As we remarked before, it will prove rewarding if you can, handily or otherwise, come by a copy of Mr. Knight's current version of his life with Dorothy and among the rich, but don't ask how to achieve it.
It is difficult from the distance of Manhattan, where this is being written, to fathom the type of mentality which would, in the emetic name of expediency, deprive San Francisco of its cable cars and substitute for them the filthy auto-omnibus which is a commonplace in every other city in the land. Presumably it is the communal urge to show the world that San Francisco is a big boy now and can suffer all the inconveniences and monstrosities of complete modernization along with everyone else, but if Mayor Lapham or anyone with San Francisco's well-being truly at heart imagines that the rest of the world will not bitterly resent such a shabby abandonment of tradition, he is grievously in error.
The rest of the United States has always, and with ample justification, believed that San Francisco is something apart and a cut above the standardized utilitarianism of its surrounding civilization, a sparkling repository of some of yesterday's glamour, a city of unfettered personalities and a hundred banners flying from building tops in the brave winds of the Golden Gate. The legendary past is very close in San Francisco, as if in the clear atmosphere of the Pacific it were possible to see farther and with more nearly perfect discernment than elsewhere. Let San Francisco prove its modernity in other directions: its bridges, its opera, even its abandonment of the immemorial four-way trolley traffic of Market Street. Its strikes, its riots, its civic convulsions, its parades, and the hang-overs of its Bohemian Club are just as big as their equivalents elsewhere, bigger if San Francisco pleases. It is a commonplace that a great deal of the old charm and individualism of San Francisco disappeared with the Fire of 1906. More of it was a casualty of the urgencies of the last war. What is left is something more precious than Mayor Lapham seems to realize, or anyone else who would abolish the city's transcendent hallmark in favor of a very small handful of municipal dollars saved. More of the town would disappear with the cable cars than San Francisco seems to understand, and without them, in the general and uninstructed public mind, there would be little enough left to distinguish it from Los Angeles, and not all of that, perhaps, favorable.
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