"They couldn't keep quiet if it killed them. Honest, for a bunch of knockers, perfect both in single handed knocking and team work, our set has anything bound to the bannister in New York.
"But what care I? Spring is coming and we will all soon hike to Bath Beach. Honest, for a country place with all the conveniences of home Bath Beach is the top liner. You can put a can under your shawl and rush a couple of blocks and always get it full of the best, and if you put butter around the side of the pail the barkeep ignores the fact and goes right ahead.
"I may get a motor boat this summer if Wilbur gets his summer snap at the island.
"Coney, I mean, not Blackwell's.
"He has never been over there except to take flowers to the Poillon sisters. They love nature so. Charlotte says it makes her homesick every time she sees a Joy Line boat go by.
"The benefit season will soon open and any person that has a couple of thousand dollars to pay for a theater can git a benefit for himself and maybe draw down a couple of hundred more. The benefit for the chorus, girls has gone up in the air, for none of them would acknowledge that they were chorus girls.
"They were either show girls or pony dancers, and that let them out. Anyway, each girl wanted to bring her maid, and the dressing rooms would have been so full of maids that there would have been no room for the dolls. I had it all framed up, too. I had six wine agents and a whisky salesman who guaranteed to appear, and that alone would have made the thing a financial success. But what could I do?
"Our bunch has been rehearsing five weeks without salaries, and with the excessive taxicab rates we got no money to spend on clothes to wear to the ball, and the wardrobe mistress keeps an awful tab on the costume hampers.
"A certain friend of mine, who, by the way, I wouldn't trust any further than I can throw an elephant by the tail, had the nerve to take me up in her apartment the other day and show me her new bathing suit she had just imported from Paris. It was a swell thing all right, but sewed in the waistband was a piece of cloth that said 'Burgomaster 2' on it, so you can draw your own conclusions.
"Honest, the way some girls steal is something awful. Take it from me, it's nothing less than stealing to swipe a wardrobe. Of course, if the show is going to close it's all right, but from a successful production, never. Lifting a scarfpin from a soused party is all right, for he is supposed to do something to remunerate the lady for wasting her time by taking her to supper.