to see me! Honestly, not boasting, I’m a regular Gertrude Ederle; you know, the girl that swam across the English Channel so many times. I wouldn’t want to swim that Channel, though. It’s bad enough in a boat. I’m a pretty good sailor, but the last time my brother and I crossed from Calais to Dover, well, ‘it happens in the best of families,’ as Briggs says, or is it Mutt and Jeff?
“Do you read the funny pages? I suppose I oughtn’t to confess it, but I read them religiously. Father often jokes me about it and pretends the money he spent sending me to college was all wasted because all I got out of it was a taste for ‘the funnies.’ I answer him back by saying he went to college, too, and all he cares anything about now is golf. It’s all joking of course. Father and I are the best friends and chums! What was your college?”
“The War College.”
“Oh, West Point! I’d just love to go up there and watch them drill sometime! I’ve seen it across the river going by on the train and it looks lovely. And fall before last, Father and Lou and I went to the big football game between West Point and the Annapolis Navy. You know they had it in Chicago, at Soldiers’ Field, in Grant Park. It’s an enormous place and lots of people couldn’t see the game at all, but our seats were grand. Father got them through Congressman Burleigh.”
“Is that,” asked Harry, “the Burleigh who’s in the paint business in South Chicago?”
“Do you know him?”
“I bought a can of paint from him once when I was redecorating my garage.”
“Why, he’s one of Father’s best friends. He’s in Congress. How funny that you should really know him!”
“You can meet congressmen if you go at it the right way.”
Miss Coakley was talking.
“Oh, Mr. Buckley, will you—? Mr. Walsh and I—Just what was it you said, Mr.—?”
“I don’t remember saying anything,” replied Dave Wallace on her left.
“Why, you—He did, too, Mr.—He said the Mauretania was the—And I said the Paris or the Majestic, or the Berengaria—Now we want you to give us your honest—”
“I never crossed on anything but the Santa Maria,” said Harry.
“Oh, Italy, how I love it! I could simply—There’s no other country—it just seems as if—If it weren’t for my sister in Baltimore—maybe some day—But a girl is foolish—”
“Grace,” said Harry, “how’s the Scotch holding out?”
“The whole week must have been tough,” said Grace.
“I don’t see how you men live through it,” said Miss Rell, “standing there on the floor of the Exchange all day, shouting at each other. Why, it simply kills me just to stand and wait five minutes in a shop! To have to do it all day, I’d perish! How do you endure it?”
“Well, you know those little stools that golf fans carry around with them. I never go on the floor without one,” said Harry.
“My father is the greatest golf fan in the world; I mean I really believe he is, without exception. He never plays less than four times a week and he’s a fine player, I mean for a man his age. He’s fifty-four years old and he goes around Onwentsia in a hundred and twenty. Can that be right?”
“Easily.”
Dinner was over and they went into the living-room. Harry and Dave Wallace were together a moment.
“I notice you didn’t talk much,” remarked Dave.
“But what I said made a big impression.”
“I’d have traded you Coakley for your dame. Your gal just goes along as if she were speaking into a mike, but Miss Coakley is a perpetual missing-word contest and it’s impossible to keep out of it—every little while you feel as if you just had to guess what’s left out.”
“She called me Burton and Buckley.”
“She called me everything from Welling to Wolheim.”
Harry tried to hide behind the piano, but Miss Rell soon found him.
“If we could get two more, don’t you think Grace would let us play bridge?”
“I don’t know the game,” said Harry.
“But I’d just love to teach you. I can teach you regular auction, but not this new contract, where you just bid and bid till you’re dizzy.”
“I haven’t any card sense and besides, I think that liquor Grace gave me was bad.”
“Oh, truly?”
“I’m going to ask her where she got it.”
“I know a man, or at least my father does, who gets the real thing straight from Canada. Only he’s out in Chicago.”
Harry peremptorily summoned Grace into the hall.
“Grace, that’s terrible Scotch you’ve got. It’s given me the first headache I’ve had in years.”
“I understand, and I’ll tell them you were sick and had to go home. You were a darling to come and I’ll never forget it.”
“Neither will I.”
At the door he said:
“Remember, old girl, I’ve left your schoolmates just as I found them. They’re still free.”
The Maysville Minstrel
Maysville was a town of five thousand inhabitants and its gas company served eight hundred homes, offices and stores.
The company’s office force consisted of two men—Ed Hunter, trouble shooter and reader of meters, and Stephen Gale, whose title was bookkeeper, but whose job was a lot harder than that sounds.
From the first to the tenth of the month, Stephen stayed in the office, accepted checks and money from the few thrifty customers who wanted their discount of five percent, soft-soaped and argued with the many customers who thought they were being robbed, and tried to sell new stoves, plates and lamps to customers who were constantly complaining of defects in the stoves, plates and lamps they had bought fifteen or twenty years ago.
After the tenth, he kept the front door locked and went all over town calling on delinquents, many of whom were a year or more behind and had no intention of trying to catch up. This tiring, futile task usually lasted until the twenty-seventh, when Hunter started reading meters and Stephen copied the readings and
