Oh, Henry!

O. Henry, as well as being a brilliant scholar of human nature and dialect, is also a meticulous recorder of grifting, double-crossing, and other forms of dishonesty, minor and major, inflicted by individuals on each other. He's written a whole cycle of short stories which read as a continuous narrative by a master grifter looking back on a successful career. It's brilliant stuff and it features some schemes which are so carefully executed they're almost legitimate, and certainly couldn't be proven not to be so by any ordinary means.

Brilliant stuff - but wouldn't be half so without the dialect. If Henry's fleeing grifters, judging themselves to be far enough by train from the forces of the law, suggested alighting rather than trying their luck on terra cotta; if for their getaway vehicle they demanded a mule swift rather than celeritous; if they observed women storing money in their underclothes rather than making currency go down in the ladies' department of the 'Old Domestic Lisle-Thread Bank' - why then, his stories would be no more than dry descriptions of ways to separate fools from their money. As it is, they're utter masterpieces of social and linguistic history, and good brain candy besides after one stodgy course reading too many.

I don't know how many Women In Love pages I've read this week. Let it stand at "some, but not many".