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We Interview Miss Ferguson
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We — Do Not Matter Miss Ferguson — Does
THE scene is one of New York's more conservative restaurants, fashionably situated behind an attractively awninged entrance in the East Fifties. It is frequented by epicures, and the waiters have brought with them from France, besides their decided accent, a marked respect for the food they serve with such artistic flourishes. They are the middlemen who bring the chef's art to their discriminating clientele.
When the curtain rises, the interrogators, namely, Gladys Hall and A d e 1 e Whitely Fletcher, are discovered at a corner table, with Elsie Ferguson. Miss Ferguson is leaving the next day for a vacation trip abroad, but she is, undoubtedly, one of those rare souls who finds time to live her life day by day.
She orders a summer luncheon consummately— the salad dressed thus and so — the iced tea brought to the precise degree of strength and poured into clinking glasses, iced and frosted.
She is charmingly dressed in black canton crepe with severely cut neck, and the turned-down brim of
her black hat is ash rose entwined. In her presence one feels the truth of personality, in which sincerity and artistry are exquisitely blent. For with her delicacy there is strength. And her voice is like the resonant deep melody of a harp.
Miss Ferguson f the details of service out of the way) : This trip is going to be a second honeymoon for my hus22
A
Photograph by Edward Thayer Monroe
"Real love," explained Elsie Ferguson, "can be known by the spirit of sacrifice.
Sacrifice is the element of which it is composed. Its counterfeit is always selfish,
always self-seeking, always jealous and retaliatory"
lACC
band and for me. He is getting out all of his holiday attire, and so am I. We are both shopping with the absorption of the first honeymoo n — fi v e years ago.
G. H. : Where are you going abroad?
Miss Ferguson : To Paris, with jaunts into Normandy suburbs. Mostly to think and to read. Always I've dreamed of travel — the other lands it naturally embraces — the romance it suggests. My vacation last year meant Japan and the Far East, yet it was not the fulfilment I expected it to be. It was more a tour of recuperation. I had been quite ill, you know, from overwork in my stage play, "Sacred and Profane Love," and the literal grinding out of pictures I was attempting. It does not pay to grind out art and grind out youth and vitality and the rightful joy-in-living at one and the same time. This generation
(Miss Ferguson's wholly alluring voice trailed off, significant
ly.)
A.W.F.: You think, then, that this generation does not take time to live.
Miss Ferguson: Americans certainly do not. They do not even take the proper time to order a meal and see to it that they get it as they order it. I've noticed, when there have been English people in my company, that they will spend hours if need be, but when they do accept the dishes, they are as they wish them to be.
The rush for the dollar is responsible for most of our faults, I would say. We forget that things are more enjoyable and pleasing when we are young and heedlessly