But that was no better, because nobody could spell her, either, including her herself. So we give it up, and she went down in the audience and looked on.
"It's all right," says Mis' Sykes. "Nobody knows what it means, anyway."
"No," says I, "but think of the work her mother's put on her dress."
And we all knew what that meant, anyway; and we all felt bad, and thought mebbe the word would be more in use by the next show we give, if any.
About in the middle of the program, just after Commerce and Raw Materials and Disputed Territory tried to raise a row, and had got held in place by Humanity, Mis' Sykes came to me behind the scenes. She was Columbia, of course, and she was dressed in the United States flag, and she carried an armful of all the other flags. We had had all we could do to keep her from wearing a crown—she'd been bound and determined to wear a crown, though we explained to her that crowns was going out of fashion and getting to be very little worn.
"But they're so regal!" she kept saying, grieving.
"Crowns are all right," we had agreed with her. "It's the regal part that we object to. Not on Columbia you don't put no crown!"
And we made her wear a wreath of stars. But the wreath was near over one eye when she came to me there, between the acts.
"Killy Poulaki," she says, "he stole that whole basket of stuff we sent down to old Mis' Herman by him. Mis' Herman found it out."