“I don’t know, sir.”
“But you were right next to her; why didn’t you ask her?” insisted Mark.
“But it was her private business,” said the barber.
“Sure it was, but that was so much more reason for worming it out of her. You are a good barber, but a h—— of a reporter.”
“Of course, the floor attendants came trooping to Thaw’s door and the house telephone and speaking tubes emitted a volley of questions.
“Harry was prepared to give an impertinent though truthful answer. But Evelyn took the phone in hand and swore that it was an accident, due to her carelessness—Harry had nothing to do with it, and she was going to apologize to the management. When things had quieted down, Thaw told me on the d. q. that he would transfer his revolver practice to a certain shooting gallery. ‘I want to be an A No. 1 shot when I return to New York,’ he said. ‘There is a fellow who has deeply wronged my girl and I am going to have it out with him.’”
HIS PORTRAIT—A MIRROR
“People wonder why I spend so much time abroad,” said Mark Twain at a little luncheon party in Vienna, where young wine, fresh from the vat, circulated freely. “One of the reasons is that I have no doubles in foreign countries, while in the States I had notice served on me twice a month on the average that I look exactly like Mr. Cobbler Smith or Mr. Bricklayer Brown. I was told they had the very same warts, in the very same places, where I sport them—accuracy or imagination, which? The day before I left New York I got a letter of that sort and, having booked passage and nothing to fear, I made bold to answer it.
“‘My dear Sir,’ I wrote. ‘I was so much impressed by the resemblance that I bear your face, feet, hands, mustache, eyelids, ears, hair, eyes, eyebrows, cheeks, and other things, that I had the portrait of yourself you so kindly enclosed framed, and hereafter I shall use it in place of a mirror when I shave.’”
“Wife never saw that letter,” added Mark. “She was packing.”