The New York party was a great success. I occupied an apartment at the hotel which the Duke of Plaza Tora would have been proud to live in. We went to theatres together and also visited the Midnight Frolic.
The very name "Midnight Frolic" suggests sin and wickedness, but the show is not at all wicked, really. If you want to be particularly devilish, the thing to do is to engage a table right underneath a glass gallery where a few chorus ladies walk around. This struck me as being a little curious, because it could either be impossibly revolting or merely futile. It must obviously be the latter, but I dare say certain men feel themselves to be "reg'lar fellers" as they look at these ladies from an impossible angle. I wonder why they have it, but I suppose the people running the show realize that it takes lots of people to make up this funny world, and that quite a large portion of humanity, while hating to be really nasty, likes at times to appear fearfully wicked to others. I guess that they are merely "showing off" like the people at the Sunday school exercises in Tom Sawyer. This world would be a very puritanical place if folk showed themselves to be as good as they really are.
The next night we went to a musical comedy which had some bright spots marred a little by the leading actor who possessed the supreme courage to imitate a rather more clever person than himself—Billy Sunday. Of course, if Billy Sunday is a knave then the actor chap is doing the right thing to expose him, but quite numbers of people have been made a little better by the Reverend William and the evidence seems to show that he is sincere and just as capable of making men better as of being able to play a jolly good game of base ball. "Voilá!"
A few days after this I visited two members of the Reina Club who are married to each other and who live on Long Island with a tiny wee baby. I loved the baby especially. She had a bad cold and her wee nose was all red at the corners and her tiny eyes were watering, but that did not prevent her from being a profound optimist. She looked at me doubtfully for a moment while she wondered if I would respond to the great big smile she threatened to give me. I got the smile all right.
And now I am back in Bethlehem, but my mind refuses to think about guns and gun carriages, but rather persists in soaring sometimes down to Annapolis, sometimes down to Norfolk, often across the ocean to the Irish channel, at all of which places I have warm friends amongst the sailors of Uncle Sam.
XIII
GUNS AND CARRIAGES
Bethlehem, U. S. A., October 30, 1917.