Fancy how I pricked up my ears.
"Tell us about it," said the same youngster.
All the young ones sit at Foxy's feet, you understand.
Foxy was nothing loath. "Elegant pearls," he said reminiscently, "blue pearls, they called them, though I couldn't see the blue. But fine and choice! It was a long operation. I had to take a job acting in her company a couple of months beforehand. You see she kept the real pearls in a safety deposit box, and wore a phony string, which added to our difficulties. First I had to persuade her to wear the real pearls one night."
"How did you do that?" somebody asked.
"I egged on the leading man to make a bet with her that he could tell the real from the phony."
"Was he in with you?"
"No, indeed. Innocent as a lamb. He didn't know that I put the idea in his mind."
"Foxy is a wonder to manage!" put in Jumbo.
"After the bet was made, we had the actress trailed every day until she went to the bank and got out her pearls. Then we knew she would wear them that night. She wore them in the first act. In the second she had on a nurse's costume, and had to leave them off. My next job was to get her maid out of the dressing-room during the second act. I managed this by having it gossiped around the company that the star was going to introduce some new business that night, and so the maid went out to look on, see? So I went in her dressing-room——"