THE PRELIMINARIES by A.C.COMER

1001 Classic Short Stories & Tales

Jon Hagadorn

Fiction, Arts

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 5 October 2025

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A young man wants to marry a local girl whose father was recently sent to prison for embezzling another person's money. He talks to the girl's mother, who has three daughters, and she doesn't want any of them to marry, because she doesn't them to grow old and bitter like her as a result of not living the grand life she had hoped for. (She was constantly pushing her husband to provide more and living beyond their lifestyle, which he why he "borrowed" short term loan from another man, and though his investment saved his family from ruin and he paid it back- he got caught.)

Then he asked his father for permission to marry and his father said that the girl's familie's reputation was now "tainted" and that would haunt him through their marriage,

Then he got an appointment to meet with her father in prison- which he did- and what a story!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales.
0:17.4	This is your host and storyteller, John Hagadorn.
0:20.5	Today, a story from
0:21.7	Cornelia A. P. Comer. Cornelia Atwood Pratt Comer was a short story author and essayist,
0:29.3	whose themes tended to provoke the next generation to take life more seriously and make
0:34.5	something of themselves by taking risks.
0:44.4	Comer's essay published in the Atlantic in February 1911, a letter to the rising generation challenges, what excuse have you, anyhow, for turning out flimsy, shallow, amusement-seeking
0:51.2	creatures when you think of the elements in your making.
0:55.9	Good advice for teachers.
0:58.3	Comer's stories are published in the anthology, Atlantic Narratives, Modern Short
1:02.4	Stories, published in 1918.
1:05.3	And now our story, the preliminaries, by A. P. Comer.
1:11.1	Part one. Young. Comer. Part 1
1:11.9	Young Oliver Pickersgill was in love with Peter Lanathorn's daughter.
1:19.3	Peter Lanethorn was serving a six-year term in the penitentiary for embezzlement.
1:24.5	It seemed to Ollie Pickersgill that there was only one right-minded way of looking at these basal facts of his situation.
1:32.8	But this simple view of the matter was destined to receive several shocks in the course of his negotiations for Ruth Lannathorn's hand.
1:40.7	I say negotiations, advisedly.
1:44.3	Most young men in love have only to secure the consent of the girl and find enough money to go to housekeeping.
1:51.0	It is quite otherwise when you wish to marry into a royal family or to allow yourself with a criminal's daughter.
1:57.5	The preliminaries are more complicated.
2:01.0	Ollie thought a man ought to marry the girl he loves, and prejudices be hanged.
	...

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