Ask any one of his acquaintances why Cooper is never seen without a
half-dozen magazines under his arm, an odd volume or two of French
criticism, and a couple of operatic scores. They will reply that it is
just Cooper's way. It goes with his black slouch hat, his badly-creased
trousers, his flowing cravat, and his general air of pre-Raphaelite
ineptitude. It goes with his comprehensive ignorance of present-day
politics and science, and everything else in the present that
well-informed people are supposed to know. It goes with his total
inability to be on time for dinners, and his habit of getting lost in
the subway. But Cooper is not as often in the clouds as some imagine.
How many of Cooper's friends, for example, have ever found peculiar
significance in his talent for forgetting things in other people's
houses? Beneath that apparently characteristic trait there is a
Machiavellian motive which I alone have found out. Hobson, let us say,
has been taking dinner with Cooper, who gently pulls a copy of "Monna
Vanna" from the shelf. Hobson does not rise to the bait. He may have
heard that Maeterlinck is a "highbrow" and it frightens him.
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