I learned that at the last regular meeting of the Ladies' Friday Afternoon Shakespeare Club, Mrs. Dr. Percy Hailey Martingale had read a paper entitled "My Trip to the Panama-Pacific Exposition," after which a dainty collation was served by mine hostess Mrs. Judge Ballard; that Miss Beryl Mae Macomber, the well-known young society heiress, was visiting friends in Spokane where rumour hath it that she would take a course of lessons in elocution; and that Mrs. Cora Hartwick Wales, prominent society matron and leader of the ultra smart set of Price's Addition, had on Thursday afternoon at her charming new bungalow, corner of Bella Vista Street and Prospect Avenue, entertained a number of her inmates at tea. Ma Pettengill and I here quickly agreed that the proofreading on the Recorder was not all it should be. Then she unctuously read me a longer item from another column which was signed "The Lounger in the Lobby":
"Mr. Benjamin P. Sutton, the wealthy capitalist of Nome, Alaska, and a prince of good fellows, is again in our midst for his annual visit to His Honour Alonzo Price, Red Gap's present mayor, of whom he is an old-time friend and associate. Mr. Sutton, who is the picture of health, brings glowing reports from the North and is firm in his belief that Alaska will at no distant day become the garden spot of the world. In the course of a brief interview he confided to ye scribe that on his present trip to the outside he would not again revisit his birthplace, the city of New York, as he did last year. 'Once was enough, for many reasons,' said Mr. Sutton grimly. 'They call it "Little old New York," but it isn't little and it isn't old. It's big and it's new—we have older buildings right in Nome than any you can find on Broadway. Since my brief sojourn there last year I have decided that our people before going to New York should see America first."
"Now what do you think of that?" demanded the lady. I said I would be able to think little of it unless I were told the precise reasons for this rather brutal abuse of a great city. What, indeed, were the "many reasons" that Mr. Sutton had grimly not confided to ye scribe?
Ma Pettengill chuckled and reread parts of the indictment. Thereafter she again chuckled fluently and uttered broken phrases to herself. "Horse-car" was one; "the only born New Yorker alive" was another. It became necessary for me to remind the woman that a guest was present. I did this by shifting my chair to face the stone fireplace in which a pine chunk glowed, and by coughing in a delicate and expectant manner.
"Poor Ben!" she murmured—"going all the day down there just to get one romantic look at his old home after being gone twenty-five years. I don't blame him for talking rough about the town, nor for his criminal act—stealing a street-car track."
It sounded piquant—a noble theft indeed! I now murmured a bit myself, striving to convey an active incredulity that yet might be vanquished by facts. The lady quite ignored this, diverging to her own opinion of New York. She tore the wrapper from a Sunday issue of a famous metropolitan daily and flaunted its comic supplement at me. "That's how I always think of New York," said she—"a kind of a comic supplement to the rest of this great country. Here—see these two comical little tots standing on their uncle's stomach and chopping his heart out with their axes—after you got the town sized up it's just that funny and horrible. It's like the music I heard that time at a higher concert I was drug to in Boston—ingenious but unpleasant."
But this was not what I would sit up for after a hard day's fishing—this coarse disparagement of something the poor creature was unfitted to comprehend.
"Ben Sutton," I remarked firmly.
"The inhabitants of New York are divided fifty-fifty between them that are trying to get what you got and them that think you're trying to get what they got."