YOU'LL have a hilarious time from
the first page to the last in reading this rollicking tale of a trip through
England and France in the happier days before the lights went out. Cornelia
Otis Skinner, the actress, and her friend Emily Kimbrough are the chief
characters.
"Emily," Cornelia said,
"attracts trouble the way blue serge attracts lint." But it was,
after all, Cornelia who came down with measles and a great many complications. Emily
did nearly drown a man, but her intention was only to be helpful; and when she
hit an English nobleman in the face, it was unpremeditated and in sport.
Certainly the shipwreck was not the fault of either of them, though Cornelia
has always averred that the mere fact of Emily's being there helped bring it
about.
They were young, and their hearts
were gay. They were earnest, too, about "doing things really
worthwhile," and "getting the most out of everything." So they
studied at the Sorbonne, and with teachers at the Comedie Francaise, but they
learned other things they'd never dreamed of, and swallowed them, round-eyed
and gulping.
They were every young American on
the first trip abroad. They discovered and they owned Europe, or such part of
it as they awkwardly cantered over, and they adored almost everything they
encountered.
This special edition of OUR
HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough has been
made available to the Armed Forces of the United States through an arrangement
with the original publisher, Dodd, Mead & Co., Inc., New York.
Editions for the Armed Services,
Inc., a non-profit organization established by the Council on Books in Wartime
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