Read "The Jack-Knife Man" by Ellis Parker Butler online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
NEW YORK, being a great mill that grinds off rough corners and operates, as it seems, for no other purpose than to make each New York inhabitant and each New York creation a facsimile of every other New York inhabitant and creation, loves those who introduce the quaint, the strange and the outlandish -- which is to say, anything not after the conventional New York model. Women have become rich with the discovery of a rag rug or a corn-husk door-mat.
To Mrs. Montgomery the trip to Peter Lane's shanty-boat was a path to fame. Her quick perception grasped every detail and saw its value or, to put it most crudely, its advertising potency. As she, with Mr. and Mrs. Vandyne, whirled down the smooth bluff road in the Vandyne barouche, she said: "Anna, I do wish we could have come in an ox-cart, or a-straddle little donkeys, or in a hay-wagon, at least."