You know what I said in the beginning about fate? Well, listen.
While the performers were on the ferryboat, and when Blondie was making her celebrated remark, her Willie was up against a bar on Broadway with a couple of men he had met some time before. They were talking about women, and one, a commercial traveler, remarked:
“I’ll put you up against a warm bunch if you want to get on the job this week. We didn’t do a thing to them in Minneapolis when I was there on my last trip. I had a big blonde on my staff, and the first night I met her I loaded her up so that she had to be carried upstairs to her room by three waiters. Here’s a letter I got from her last week, and while she’s no ten thousand dollar beauty yet she’s a good fellow and a thoroughbred sport. Read it, Willie. When she hits this burg I’ll put you next and bet 20 to 1 that she’ll drink you to a standstill, for she’s the biggest tank I ever ran across.”
And when Willie read the letter which bore his wife’s signature and which put him wise to a few things he had never before dreamed of, he did what many another man would do under the same circumstances—that is, many another wise man. He ordered a round of drinks, and then he kept on ordering and saying nothing, letting the other fellows tell all they knew, and the first chance he got he blew out and went home, not to the place he had fixed up for Mrs. Willie, but to the home presided over by his mother. He simply abandoned the flat and all of his day dreams. They vanished like mist in the morning’s sun.
A few days later he got a letter from his wife and in it she reproached him for not meeting her, and furthermore she inquired what had become of the flat he had fixed up for her.
“I am broke, you know,” she wrote, “and I think the least you could do is to help me out.”
She signed it “Your loving (sic) and affectionate wife,” and it almost gagged him to read it.
He took a sheet of paper and wrote the answer. It contained but one line, but it told a whole chapter. In due course of time it was delivered to her. She opened the envelope and read the enclosure. What she said was unfit for publication, for what she saw was only two words and they were:
“Forget it.”
