Dawn O'Hara: The Girl Who Laughed

O Baumbach’s, with your deliciously crumbling butter cookies and your kaffee kuchen, and your thick cream, and your thicker waitresses and your cockroaches, and your dinginess a...

I did not write Norah about Von Gerhard. After all, I told myself, there was nothing to write. And so I was the first to break the solemn pact that we had made.

There followed a blessed week of work—a “human warious” week, with something piquant lurking at every turn. A week so busy, so kaleidoscopic in its quick succession of events th...

In a corner of Frau Nirlanger’s bedroom, sheltered from draughts and glaring light, is a little wooden bed, painted blue and ornamented with stout red roses that are faded by ti...

I can understand the emotions of a broken-down war horse that is hitched to a vegetable wagon. I am going to Milwaukee to work! It is a thing to make the gods hold their sides a...

It’s hard trying to develop into a real Writer Lady in the bosom of one’s family, especially when the family refuses to take one seriously. Seven years of newspaper grind have t...

Consternation has corrugated the brows of the aborigines. Consternation twice confounded had added a wrinkle or two to my collection. We are homeless. That is, we are Knapfless—...

Two days before the date set for Von Gerhard’s departure the book was finished, typed, re-read, packed, and sent away. Half an hour after it was gone all its most glaring faults...

Some day the marriageable age for women will be advanced from twenty to thirty, and the old maid line will be changed from thirty to forty. When that time comes there will be su...

A man’s figure rose from the shadows of the porch and came forward to meet us as we swung up to the curbing. I stifled a scream in my throat. As I shrank back into the seat I he...

From husbands in general, and from oogly German husbands in particular may Hymen defend me! Never again will I attempt to select “echt Amerikanische” clothes for a woman who mus...

I am living at a little private hotel just across from the court house square with its scarlet geraniums and its pretty fountain. The house is filled with German civil engineers...

There was a week in which to scurry about for a new home. The days scampered by, tripping over one another in their haste. My sleeping hours were haunted by nightmares of landla...

Oh, but it was clean, and sweet, and wonderfully still, that rose-and-white room at Norah’s! No street cars to tear at one’s nerves with grinding brakes and clanging bells; no t...

So Spring danced away, and Summer sauntered in. My pillows looked less and less tempting. The wine of the northern air imparted a cocky assurance. One blue-and-gold day followed...

Two more aborigines have appeared. One of them is a lady aborigine. They made their entrance at supper and I forgot to eat, watching them. The new-comers are from Vienna. He is...

Some one must have been very kind, for there were doctors, and a blue-and-white striped nurse, and bottles and things. There was even a vase of perky carnations—scarlet ones. I...

Of Von Gerhard I had not had a glimpse since that evening of my hysterical outburst. On Christmas day there had come a box of roses so huge that I could not find vases enough to...

“You who were ever alert to befriend a man You who were ever the first to defend a man, You who had always the money to lend a man Down on his luck and hard up for a V, Sure you...

The shabby blue office coat hangs on the hook in the little sporting room where Blackie placed it. No one dreams of moving it. There it dangles, out at elbows, disreputable, its...

We laid Peter to rest in that noisy, careless, busy city that he had loved so well, and I think his cynical lips would have curled in a bitterly amused smile, and his somber eye...