So there is a little pause and the lady still weeping silent so I goes on, “Has that dick been telling you lies so as to keep his job lady? If he has told you the truth it is this that I have et maybe a dozen dinners at your husband’s expense and I have walked a little ways on the street with him and sat once talking in an art-gallery and that is all. I have not even been into a taxi-cab with him and he left his own car at home for his wife or that is what he told me and if it aint true it is not my fault. And if it is the cost of the dinners that worries you it would of been easier to of saved all the money you must of paid to that there dick,” I says. “It was mostly in cheap places that we et because he was scared he would be saw.”
“And if you are so innocent why do you have to hide?” she cries.
“He said he had to Mrs. Edgerton and when a gentleman asks you to dinner at a cheap place you can’t hint for a better place at least not if you are a lady. I shouldn’t wonder if the reason was because he had a wife that he thought wasn’t reasonable and wouldn’t believe the truth if he told it to her.”
“But why does my husband have to dine with a woman I do not meet?”
“You will not like it,” I says, “if I tell you that you and your lady friends can’t give your husband what he has to have in his political life. But you had ought to see it because you would scorn to know the things that his job requires him to know.”
“What things?”
“Things about the way the plain people of this country feel and what they want.”
“A manicure girl!” she kind of snorts.
“There is a lot of us,” I says, “and it aint only that we have got votes but we do a lot of talking and can be a political force if you get us real mad,” I says. “And then there’s Pop,” I says, “a gas-house worker in Camden New Jersey and if anybody was to ask you what such a man would say about the League of Nations for instance would you have any idea what to answer? No Mrs. Edgerton you wouldn’t but right there on my dressing table underneath the cold cream jar is a letter about it that I was intending to read to Mr. Edgerton the next time I meet him.”
Well she looks me over some more and then she says in what is meant to be icy tones of voice, “Why could his wife not attend these political conferences?”