Word: soberly
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...have grown so accustomed to thinking of war as a highly mechanized and incredibly expensive enterprise that many a sober fellow, among them your columnist, has doubted the economic possibility of a European conflict. Pondering excessively, I am unable to see that the credit agencies, governmental and private, which assisted in the confection of the World War could come to the front again, as so many observers are willing to predict, for their zeal has cooled and their money is padlocked, and mere subsistence is difficult for them. The kind of war which we spell with a capital letter...
...their moral restrictions with a good New England imagination. In all the Houses, save Adams and Dunster, for instance, it is necessary to procure such permissions from the Senior Tutor or House Secretary twenty-four hours before the artful female is to inject her touch of potential scandal between sober Georgian walls...
Guards in the State Penitentiary at Joliet, Ill. had to carry two murderers named Sullivan and Scott to solitary confinement when, too drunk to walk, they bellowed "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" in a cellhouse. Present but sober were Murderers Nathan Leopold, prison librarian, and Richard Loeb, who conducts a correspondence school for convicts. They said they had "just dropped in." were excused...
discouraged him. Turning to a coffeehouse, he was near to joining a sober looking man drinking a dish of chocolate, but a brawl suddenly broke out, and the sober looking man joined in to rescue a poor drunken wretch whom Sobersides addressed as "Dear Dick." The Vagabond bethought himself of Dean Swift, and would have visited that worthy, but his attire was so disarranged by a jar of slops flung from an upper window that he betook himself instead to Vauxhall, and rested in a quiet corner of the garden, seeing but unseen. This morning he will ascertain the views...
What can the plain reader make of all this? If he is in a good humor he will doubtless laugh, but at what? Sober-sided Critic Edmund Wilson gives as his opinion that: "Miss Stein is trying to superinduce a state of mind in which the idea of the nation will seem silly, in which we shall be conscious of ourselves as creatures who do not lend themselves to that conception." Still puzzled, the plain reader dips into another Stein volume (Tender Buttons), to his astonishment brings up these...