Campbell: “And she sent her down here, and told Roberts to keep her till she came herself.”
Both Ladies: “Well?”
Campbell: “And I found poor old Roberts here, looking out for a cook that he’d never seen before, and expecting to recognize a woman that he’d never met in his life.” He explodes in another fit of laughter. The ladies stare at him in mystification.
Mrs. Roberts: “I would have stayed myself to meet her, but I’d left my plush bag with my purse in it at Stearns’s, and I had to go back after it.”
Mrs. Campbell: “She had to leave him. What is there to laugh at?”
Mrs. Roberts: “I see nothing to laugh at, Willis.”
Campbell, sobered: “You don’t?”
Both Ladies: “No.”
Campbell: “Well, by Jove! Then perhaps you don’t see anything to laugh at in Roberts’s having to guess who the cook was; and going up to the wrong woman, and her getting mad, and going out and bringing back her little fiery-red tipsy Irishman of a husband, that wanted to fight Roberts; and my having to lie out of it for him; and their going off again, and the husband coming back four or five times between drinks, and having to be smoothed up each time—”
Both Ladies: “No!”