“Sure!” I said. “Just tell her you didn’t sleep all night and you’re wore out and you want to take a nap.”
So she pulled this gag at lunch Saturday and Katie said she was tired too. She went up to her room and Ella snuck out to keep her date with Francis. In less than an hour she romped into our room again and throwed herself on the bed.
“Well,” I says, “it must of been a little apartment if it didn’t only take you this long to see it.”
“Oh, shut up!” she said. “I didn’t see no apartment. And don’t say a word to me or I’ll scream.”
Well, I finally got her calmed down and she give me the details. It seems that she’d met Francis, and he’d got a taxi and they’d got in the taxi and they hadn’t no sooner than got in the taxi when Francis give her a kiss.
“Quick returns,” I says.
“I’ll kill you if you say another word!” she says.
So I managed to keep still.
Well, I didn’t know Francis’ home address, and Wall Street don’t run Sundays, so I spent the Sabbath training on a quart of rye that a bellhop picked up at a bargain sale somewheres for fifteen dollars. Mean wile Katie had been let in on the secret and stayed in our room all day, moaning like a prune-fed calf.
“I’m afraid to leave her alone,” says Ella. “I’m afraid she’ll jump out the window.”
“You’re easily worried,” I said. “What I’m afraid of is that she won’t.”
Monday morning finally come, as it generally always does, and I told the gals I was going to some first-class men’s store and buy myself some ties and shirts that didn’t look like a South Bend embalmer.
So the only store I knew about was H. L. Krause & Co. in Wall Street, but it turned out to be an office. I ast for Mr. Griffin and they ast me my name and I made one up, Sam Hall or something, and out he come.
If I told you the rest of it you’d think I was bragging. But I did bust a few records. Charley Brickley and Walter Eckersall both kicked five goals from field in one football game, and they was a bird named Robertson or something out at Purdue that kicked seven. Then they was one of the old-time ball players, Bobby Lowe or Ed Delehanty, that hit four or five home runs in one afternoon. And out to Toledo that time Dempsey made big Jess set down seven times in one round.
Well, listen! In a little less than three minutes I floored this bird nine times and I kicked him for eight goals from the field and I hit him over the fence for ten home runs. Don’t talk records to me!
So that’s what they meant in the clipping about a Hoosier cleaning up in Wall Street. But it’s only a kid, see?
II
Ritchey
Well, I was just getting used to the Baldwin and making a few friends round there when Ella suddenly happened to remember that it was Griffin who had recommended it. So one day, wile Kate was down to the chiropodist’s, Ella says it was time for us to move and she had made up her mind to find an apartment somewheres.
“We could get along with six rooms,” she said. “All as I ask is for it to be a new building and on some good street, some street where the real people lives.”
“You mean Fifth Avenue,” said I.
“Oh, no,” she says. “That’s way over our head. But we’d ought to be able to find something, say, on Riverside Drive.”
“A six room apartment,” I says, “in a new building on Riverside Drive? What was you expecting to pay?”
“Well,” she said, “you remember that time I and Kate visited the Kitchells in Chi? They had a dandy apartment on Sheridan Road, six rooms and brand new. It cost them seventy-five dollars a month. And Sheridan Road is Chicago’s Riverside Drive.”
“Oh, no,” I says. “Chicago’s Riverside Drive is Canal Street. But listen: Didn’t the Kitchells have their own furniture?”
“Sure they did,” said Ella.
“And are you intending to furnish us all over complete?” I asked her.
“Of course not,” she says. “I expect to get a furnished apartment. But that don’t only make about twenty-five dollars a month difference.”
“Listen,” I said: “It was six years ago that you visited the Kitchells; beside which, that was Chi and this is the Big Town. If you find a six room furnished apartment for a hundred dollars in New York City today, we’ll be on Pell Street in Chinatown, and maybe Katie can marry into a laundry or a joss house.”
“Well,” said the wife, “even if we have to go to $150 a month for a place on the Drive, remember half of it’s my money and half of it’s Kate’s, and none of it’s yours.”
“You’re certainly letter perfect in that speech,” I says.
“And further and more,” said Ella, “you remember what I told you the other day. Wile one reason we moved to New York was to see Life, the main idear was to give Kate a chance to meet real men. So every nickel we spend making ourself look good is just an investment.”
“I’d rather feel good than look good,” I says, “and I hate to see us spending so much money on a place to live that they won’t be nothing left to live on. For three or four hundred a month you might get a joint on the Drive with a bed and two chairs, but I can’t drink furniture.”
“This trip wasn’t planned as no spree for you,” says Ella. “On the other hand, I believe Sis would stand a whole lot better show of landing the right kind of a man if the rumor was to get out that her
