Word: vain
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...last week, after a night of tossing and turning, California Industrialist Arthur Hanisch, 63, gave up his vain effort to sleep. "You'd better go back to bed, Arthur," said his wife, "Santa Claus isn't here yet." Hanisch was, indeed, like a boy waiting to see a new toy. Twenty-nine months ago he set out to build a dream palace for his small (140 employees), 17-year-old pharmaceutical business, the Stuart Co. He hired Manhattan Architect Edward D. Stone after seeing a picture of Stone's highly praised design for the New Delhi embassy...
Scene: a side-street just off the Square, where a man is spinning the wheels of his car in a vain effort to maneuver out of the icy snow in which he is parked...
Cows Are Not Vain. Next, Knopf berates reviewers, longs for the good old days of H. L. Mencken ("who could even sell a book by denouncing it, so arresting was his invective"), Heywood Broun and Yale's William Lyon Phelps, "at whom the intellectuals used to laugh but whose enthusiasms were really contagious." The only present-day reviewer contagious enough for Knopf is the New York Times's notoriously Phelpsian Orville Prescott. Says Knopf: Prescott can "make them buy the book he praises. We would all benefit enormously were there a dozen like him. Whether they were sound...
...indeed practicing novelists." The fellows are unreliable, snorts Knopf: "We pay substantial advances for books that never get written." Worst of all, they are self-important: "You can offer a grade A milk and a grade B if you are in the dairy business, but authors are vain in a way that cows...
Weird Wonder Boy. The marriage was "a ghastly error." Out of bed, Mathilde was "naive, vain and stupid." In bed, it never occurred to her that Verlaine's "tigerish love" hid a yearning for motherly protection. When friends came to the house one day in Mathilde's absence, he was in a small closet, locked in the housemaid's shielding arms...