The Father of Teeth
In the hurry of my late middle age, however, said the Father of Teeth romantically, I found that I had prematurely penetrated a large, well-appointed study with a most romantic view of a large, well-appointed garden and of the sun setting behind a high wall with romantic broken glass on top. The study was luxuriously carpeted and uninhibitedly wallpapered in lilac and clinging rosebud, and the copious bookshelves were intimately packed with hundreds of slender yet voluptuous volumes by authors such as Cassandra Wilde, Brittany Playfair, Glenda Lissome and Rosalind Smoothbore. Placed to best advantage near the window was a large, well-made desk at which a large woman romantically laboured and grunted. Encased with horrifying instability in a virginal smock of washing-powder white, her bulging and heaving back was towards me, said the Father of Teeth, and so despite my hurry I strode across the study, past rows of titles by Fallopia Hartbyrne and Courtney Windbrake and Porphyria Storm, and started reading over the woman's shuddering shoulder. But no sooner had I encountered the seventh solecism of the seventh line, said the Father of Teeth, than a side-door slid open like a willing orifice among the sweltering shelves and a thin, dried-up female emerged, wearing thick spectacles and a shapeless cardigan mottled in shades of passionate purulence. With a gaze of devoted adoration at the besmocked one, who did not so much as quiver a powdered jowl in acknowledgement, the newcomer lifted from the desk a pile of some several hundred sheets of paper, each bearing as best it could a dozen single-sentence paragraphs of single-clause almost-sentences in flawless copperplate penmanship; and then she scuttled back whence she had come, without even sparing a glance at my humble and hurried self and my fourteenth least romantic grin. For in settings such as this and with company such as these, said the Father of Teeth incidentally, I sometimes find it convenient to make myself not so much invisible as implausible, which is just as effective as invisibility and considerably more convenient when it comes to not being trodden on. So the besmocked one continued to bulge and grunt without pause, scratching with a rampant gold-plated fountain pen from which the rays of the setting sun recoiled in roseate embarrassment; and such was my depth of feeling, said the Father of Teeth romantically, and such my sense of sentiment and respect for the pathetic fallacy, that I seriously considered transforming into a blood-clot and chomping a quick cerebrovascular incident into the woman's area of Broca. But I resisted that temptation, said the Father of Teeth, for not only would such a course of action terminate dozens if not hundreds of careers, even unto those of Virginia Mount, Dolly Ryder, Ganymedette deGlanders and Lizzie Eatwell, but the lady and her willing slave had, after all, dedicated their lives to the world's holiest profession, namely the palliative treatment of a passing if traumatic hormonal disorder through the sanctifying medium of holy commerce; and that had to count for something. Besides, said the Father of Teeth romantically, and as I may have mentioned before, I was in something of a hurry.
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