Strangely enough no one laughed, but with another girl and at another time Willie would have laughed himself almost into convulsions, for he has a keen sense of humor.
The four ate and drank at that table until it was time for the night show and then they separated, by which time Willie was so far gone that he sat throughout the evening performance while she smiled encouragingly at him from the other side of the footlights.
That is how the courtship really began.
For the rest of the week they were together all the time, and she began to realize that she had at last reached the apex of her ambition and found a man who looked like a wedding ring and a board bill proposition.
A fellow like this can have a dozen affairs and no one will question them, but when it comes to marrying there is a different story. To the outsiders it bore all the earmarks of a week’s stand at first, and as he never showed his hand no one was any the wiser, not even his most intimate friends.
A man’s declaration of love for a woman is a very beautiful thing so long as he is honest about it and keeps within his own class. The slang of the slums can be made as sincere as the most polished English. But in a case of infatuation like this—it might be called temporary insanity—it doesn’t hardly seem right there should be any ceremony. The halo of romance existed only in the mind of the boy—for the woman it was a business transaction with the obligations all on one side, so it was with a flippant air that she promised to “love, honor and obey,” and then after the briefest of brief honeymoons she went on the road with the show, while the young husband at once set about preparing a home for her when she should get ready to settle down to a life of domesticity.
At first he figured on taking her to his mother’s home, but when he told of the hurry-up wedding and showed a picture of the woman to whom he had given his name, the scene that followed forever settled the question, and he knew that his soubrette wife and his mother would never live under the same roof together.
The morals of the members of a burlesque show on the road have come to be a joke. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are very rare, though I personally know of some good women who have gone on tour through force of circumstances and have come through the ordeal morally and physically clean. I regret to be compelled to record that the Genial Giantess doesn’t belong in this class, and when the aggregation had torn thirty weeks off the calendar they came back looking like refugees from the San Francisco earthquake.
“I ain’t got a cent,” remarked the blonde on the ferryboat coming from Jersey City, “and I don’t have to have because Willie will stake me as soon as I get to New York, and besides he’s got a flat fixed up for me.”
That was the truth. He had a nice apartment for the homecoming, and while he wasn’t as much in love with her as he was when they were first married, he still felt that he had obligations and he ought to make good.