I assured her there were not. She gazed out of the window with a pondering air.
“After all, there are respectable people on the stage,” she said, following some subterranean course of thought.
I knew my Betty and hastened to reassure her—
“She’s on the top floor. Her contaminating influence, if she has one, would have to percolate through another apartment before it got to me.”
She did not smile and I did not expect it. Mrs. Ferguson has no sense of humor, and that’s one of the reasons I love her. There is an obsession in the public mind just now about the sense of humor. People ask anxiously if other people have it as Napoleon used to ask if attractive ladies he had wooed in vain “were still virtuous.” It’s like being a bromide— Give me a bromide, a humorless, soft, cushiony bromide, rather than those exhausting people who have established a reputation for wit and are living up to it. Betty is not soft and cushiony, but she is always herself.
“I wish you could live in a house of your own like a Christian,” she said.
We have talked over this before. This subject has an embarrassing side—I’ll explain it later—so I hastened to divert her.
“Why should you be wrought up over Miss Harris? I’m sure from what Mrs. Bushey tells me she’s a very nice person,” and then I remembered and added brightly: “She always pays her rent.”
Betty gave me a somber side glance.
“She’s very handsome.”