John Henry and the Restless Sex

By Earl Derr Biggers

This amusing short story was written in 1921 and takes a humorous look at how young women have changed as emancipation takes hold. John Henry is a young copywriter who likes his boss' secretary. She earns $20 more per week than he does and is so engrossed in her work she does not even stop thinking about it on a date John Henry can ill-afford.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066410001

Earl Derr Biggers

Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) was an American novelist and playwright. Born in Ohio, Biggers went on to graduate from Harvard University, where he was a member of The Harvard Lampoon, a humor publication for undergraduates. Following a brief career as a journalist, most significantly for Cleveland-based newspaper The Plain Dealer, Biggers turned to fiction, writing novels and plays for a popular audience. Many of his works have been adapted into film and theater productions, including the novel Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), which was made into a Broadway stage play the same year it was published. Towards the end of his career, he produced a highly popular series of novels centered on Honolulu police detective Charlie Chan. Beginning with The House Without a Key (1925), Biggers intended his character as an alternative to Yellow Peril stereotypes prominent in the early twentieth century. His series of Charlie Chan novels inspired dozens of films in the United States and China, and has been recognized as an imperfect attempt to use popular media to depict Chinese Americans in a positive light.

Book preview

Earl Derr Biggers

John Henry and the Restless Sex

Published by Good Press, 2020

[e-mail]

EAN 4064066410001

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

Text

IN THE far-off, placid days, when woman's place was still the home, the love story was a much less complicated affair. Then Grace or Mabel or Genevieve, returning from the school that had finished her, curled up on a sofa in the parlor in the genial company of a box of chocolates and a copy of When Knighthood Was in Flower. There she waited, disturbed only by the occasional rattle of dishes manipulated by mother in the kitchen.

Between this dear girl and the grave intervened but a single possibility—the arrival of the young knight on his milk-white charger. At the first faint sound of Cupid paging her she leaped to her feet, rearranged her hair and ran out on the porch with open arms. Unless the competition happened to be unusually keen the knight had little difficulty in persuading her to desert the parlor. She had never liked the wall paper, anyhow. The first thing father knew he was paying for a trousseau and sweeping rice off the front walk.

But times have altered. The parlor is deserted. Grace and Genevieve and Mabel are abroad in the marts of trade, and doing very well, thank you. The young man who would catch the eye of one of them must swap his charger for a touring car—and he must be able in argument. Can he persuade his lady that matrimony offers the same thrills and excitement as a good job downtown? Can he prove his ability to support her in the style to which she has been accustomed by her own weekly pay envelope?

In the long list of stumbling-blocks that may detain the eager lover that pay envelope has taken its place, the greatest of them all. The handsome commoner who fell for the Crown Princess of Ruritania had considerable chasm to span. The poor but honest ribbon clerk who adored the millionaire's only daughter was in for a bit of bridge building. But in all history there has been no such gulf as this—the frowning, impassable gulf between the young man who gets forty dollars a week and the girl of his choice in the same office who is getting sixty.

On the worried side of such a gulf John Henry Jackson sat at his desk in the office of the Phœnix Advertising Agency. A tall young man of twenty-five or so with keen blue eyes—not bad-looking, if you came right down to