IV
ANYTHING ONCE
I
Aint it funny the things that comes into a person's head when they are rubbing cold cream onto their nose? All sorts of stuff, some of it good sense and some of it the bunk. But most of it pretty near O.K. If some one was to take down the ideas I get at such a sacred hour, I'd be out of the dancing game and into the highbrow class just as quick as the printer got through his job.
It sure is a time when a woman's true thoughts come to the surface along with the dust and last night's make-up, and many a big resolve has been made owing to that cleanly habit. Wasn't there some wise bird made up a quotation about cleanliness being next to God knows what? Well, believe you me, its the truth, for once a woman starts in with the cold cream all alone,—and she sure does it at no other time—there is no telling what will come of it beside a clean pink face.
With me personally myself, thats where most of my ideas about life come from—right out of the cold cream tube! And while indulging in this well known womanly occupation the other evening I commenced thinking about rest and how important it is for us Americans—and of the way we go after it—like it was something we had to catch and catch quick or it would get away from us. Do you get me? If not, leave me tell you what a friend of mine, which has just been mustard out of the service says to me, when I was checking up his experiences abroad while he was checking up what the waiter had put down.
"My idea of rest?" he says. "Why taking Belleau Woods after three restless weeks in the trenches," he says.
Which sort of puts the nut in the shell, as the saying is. And also at the same time reminds me of the rest I just recently took.
Not that I generally need one any more than any other thoroughly successful star, for heavens knows the best known parlor dancing act in the world and Broadway, which mine undoubtedly is, dont need to rest because the managers theirselves always come after me and resting I leave to the booking-agency hounds. But this time it was bonea fido, and come about in a sort of odd way.