“I’m feeling bad this morning. I gart to go and arrest a man for whom I have a considerable admiration. I gart to go down-town to Washington Square and arrest a prominent citizen at eight o’clock sharp. I guess they’re waiting right now for me to come along and make that arrest. Where’s my black-jack?”
He fumbled in his pocket for a leather-covered life-preserver, which he flourished truculently. Leaning upon the shoulders of the nymphs, he waved a farewell and staggered out.
Sylvia asked the bartender what he really was.
“He’s Under-Sheriff McMorris. At eight o’clock he’s going to arrest a prominent New York citizen for misappropriation of some fund.”
That evening in the papers Sylvia read that Under-Sheriff McMorris had burst into tears when ex-Governor Somebody or other had walked down the steps of his house in Washington Square and offered himself to the custody of the law.
“I don’t like to have to do this, Mr. Governor,” Under-Sheriff McMorris had protested.
“You must do your duty, Mr. Under-Sheriff.”
The crowd had thereupon cheered loudly, and the wife of the ex-Governor, dissolved in tears, had waved the Stars and Stripes from an upper window.
“Jug for the ex-Governor and a jag for the under-sheriff,” said Sylvia. “If only the same spirit could be applied to minor arrests. That may come. It’s wonderful, really, how in this mighty republic they manage to preserve any vestige of personality, but they do.”
The play ran through the autumn and went on tour in January. Sylvia did not add much to her appreciation of America in the course of it, because, as was inevitable in the short visits they paid to various towns, she had to depend for intercourse upon the members of the company. She reached New York again shortly before her twenty-eighth birthday. When nearly all her fellow-players returned to England, she decided to stay behind. The first impression she had received of entering upon a new phase of life when she landed in New York had not yet deserted her, and having received an offer from the owner of what sounded, from his description, like a kind of hydropathic establishment to entertain the visitors there during the late summer and fall, she accepted. In August, therefore, she left New York and went to Sulphurville, Indiana.