The Cut Glass Bowl

I do not usually read short stories but last week I read "The Cut Glass Bowl" by F Scott Fitzgerald. 

It is a masterful short story set in the nineteen twenties.

It contains within it one of the best insults I have seen in a long time.

An ex lover gives a young woman a cut glass punch bowl for a wedding present after she has rejected him to marry another.

He said "Evelyn I'm going to give you a present that's as hard as you are, and as beautiful and as empty and as easy to see through."

The story explains how the bowl is pivotal at various points in her life - and its influence is always malevolent.

The picture is not of a cut glass bowl with its sharp edges but of a normal salad bowl!
Image courtesy of John Kasawa / FreeDigitalPhotos.net