Word: bascomb
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Rearing the healthy little animal is comparatively easy. Destroying Lottie, the handsome, ignorant grown animal, is difficult indeed. The ruse of giving Lottie rein in a cheap flirtation fails through Ralph's weak forgiveness. Mrs. Bascomb lives away for some years, torn free. When she returns things are worse than before. Small Dids is "on the town," getting tough while Lottie joyrides; Ralph is still grubbing...
Lottie's vanity in wearing tight shoes, and the presence in town of a "Westopractor," suave quack, supply Mrs. Bascomb with tools for a Lady Macbethian coup. She engineers the perfectly healthy, stupid girl into bed with "spine trouble." Hypochondria sets in. Lottie is bedridden...
Under her grandmother's guidance, Dids grows into the best all-around youngster at the high school. Ralph bucks up, with peace at home and a renewed interest in athletics. In a fierce whisper one night, Mrs. Bascomb tells him to cut and run; she will cover his tracks and he shall have his life...
...waked up as well as bucked up. He stays to take his medicine. And when Dids goes off to college, Mrs. Bascomb finally focuses on the now pitiful, bedridden Lottie as a new object for the domineering energy and mother-love that was as much the cause as it is the cure of so much sorrow. The Significance. Dorothy Canfield has here achieved a magnificent demonstration of the literary maxim: "An author must be God to his characters." She has first caused, then seen, understood and clearly presented, everything these Bascombs think and feel and do and are. Good...
...first, he had to take advice, but did so with some hesitation. He appointed C. Bascomb Slemp as his Secretary to handle a number of political problems. He leaned on the arms of Secretaries Mellon and Hoover, but, when tax-reduction was proposed, he let Mr. Mellon float it as a trial balloon with tacit consent, before determining how strongly to support...