"Oh, so I'm on the shelf, am I?" she says, "well, leave me tell you Mary Gilligan, if it wasn't for us back numbers you new numbers wouldn't even be here, don't forget that! And after having been the first American lady to do the double backward leap on the two center trapeses, I can hardly be called a dead one, even if a little heavier than I was. And from that time on I have never ceased to be forward."
"You'd have to show me," I says, grimly.
"All right, I will," she says.
And believe you me, she did. She went and got on her dolman and her spring hat and left me in wrath and the midst of that income tax with that "I'll never come back" air so familiar to all well-regulated families.
Well, as I sat there struggling over where to put the × and = marks, and how much exemption could I get away with and still be on speaking terms with myself, and wondering whether the two fool dogs was dependents or not—which they aught to be, seeing how helpless they are and a big expense and Gawd knows I keep them only for appearances and they aught to come under the head of professional expenditures, because no well-known actress but has them to help out the scenery—well anyways, I was deep in this highly high-brow occupation in the comparatively perfect silence of my exclusive flat where ordinarily we don't hear a thing but the neighbors' pianola and the dumb-waiter and the auto horns on the drive and the train just beyond—well, this comparatively for New York, perfect silence was broke by an awful yell in the apartment itself.
"Anarchy!" a terrible voice hollered. And then again "Anarchy! Anarchy!"
Believe you me, my blood turned to lemon soda for a moment and the boys in the trenches never had worse crawling down the back than me at that minute, coming as it did right on top of me, writing in opposite to B. income from salaries—you know—$60,000.00. The silence which followed was even worse. And I sat there sort of frozen while expecting a bomb would go off any minute, and Gawd knows sixty thousand is a lot of money, but any one which investigated the true facts could quickly see that I earn every cent of it and anyways brains has a right to the bigger share, not to mention ability, and if the way I worked myself up from the lower classes ain't proof of what can be done single-handed in America, I don't know what is, and anybody which works as hard and lives as decent as I done can do the same, not that I want to hand myself anything extra, only speaking personally, I am in a position to know.
But just the same I wasn't reasoning at the minute and the justice, as you might say, of my case didn't occur to me until later. As I sat there trying to remember to think, the voice yells it again, only this time with additions.
"Anarchy! Love Anarchy! Pretzel!"
And then I realised it was that parrot belonging to the new cook.