“Boston.”
“I do not.”
“Ever see a Virginia Xantippe?”
“Well, good-by!”
This is the way I am likely to be interrupted throughout the entire course of my story. True, I shall leave out the hello and good-by part of the business as too realistic, but you will know when they have been hooking on from my stopping to argue with my supposed readers. By the way, if this chapter bears, to your mind, internal evidence of having been composed in Bedlam, you will understand how it has fared with me when I tell you that I had hardly spoken a dozen words when my telephone began to ring like mad. A thousand cross-lines at least must have been connected with our private wire before my first sentence was finished. Heavens, what a jingling they are keeping up even now! I must speak with them.
“Hello! hello! hello!—Good-by! good-by! good-by!”
And why all this clatter, do you suppose?
It is nearly all about these seven words in my opening sentence,—Thine almond eye, my Ah Yung Whack.
I shall analyze the questions and remarks of the first hundred as a sample of the thousands.
Of this number, three announced themselves as authors of English grammars, adding that they could not sustain me unless I changed my ah to ah my; and of the three, one that I should have said Virginian instead of Virginia Xantippe; quoting a rule from his own grammar. Which I was glad he did, seeing that I had never read a line in any English grammar in my born days; and I find that when you are writing a book no kind of knowledge comes amiss.