“When friends come to cheer them up they sigh softly and say, ’Ah, no; it is too late.  Once I had aims and aspirations, but Fate has swept them all away.  I shall only drift and drift now, until it is all over.’

“Then, the comforters go away with tears in their eyes and send her flowers.

“‘How the poor child has suffered,’ they say.  But Providence only has a quiet laugh up her sleeve and says, as she winks the other eye,

“‘What fools these mortals be!’”

THE TELEPHONE FACE

“What’s the matter with that man?” said the Observer, repeating his friend’s interrogation, as they passed a pedestrian wearing a most prodigious frown.  “Don’t you know what’s the matter with him?  He’s got the telephone face.

“Never heard of it, eh?  Well, that shows that your powers of perception are not particularly acute.  The telephone face is no longer a physiognomical freak, but a prevalent expression among the several thousand unfortunate clerks and business men who find extensive use for the telephone necessary.  It is a distinctive cast of features, too, which can readily be distinguished from any other by one who can read faces at all.

“The dyspeptic has a ‘face.’  His expression is fitful and disgruntled, but underlying it is a gleam of hope; the insolvent man, harassed by creditors, has another well-defined type of facial mold.  It is haunted and worried, with a tinge of defiance in it; the owner of the ’bicycle face’ has his features set in lines of deadly resolution; the ’golf face’ displays fanatical enthusiasm and a puzzled look resulting from a struggle with the vocabulary of the game; the ‘poker face’ shows immobility and superstition; the ‘telegraph face,’ according to a well-known New York professor, is ‘vacant, stoic and unconcerned,’ but the ‘telephone face’ stands out among all of these in a class peculiar to itself.  There are traces of a battle and defeat marked on it; the stamp of hope deferred and resignation, yet without that placidity which usually betokens the acceptance of an inevitable destiny.  The brows are drawn together above the nose, and at times a murderous glint shows in the half-closed eyes of the possessor.

“The peculiar feature about the man with the ‘telephone face’ is, that he always believes the day will come when he will be able to get the right number and the right man without being told that the ’line’s busy,’ ‘party does not reply,’ or ‘phone is out of order.’  He is like the man who always backs the wrong horse, the poet with an ’Ode to Spring,’ or the honest man seeking a political job, continually defeated, but ever dreaming of ultimate success.