ld she hold him back from serving his country only I dont
hardly believe she urged him to go for quite the patriotic reasons I
did, he having been a traveling man and so when he retired on her income
she didnt feel as natural and affectionate and homelike and all that as
when he was away most of the time. But at any rate I and she were both
war-widows and old friends from the time her mother was lady-lion tamer
and mine on the trapeese, and so in spite of the bills she charges me
she has more refinement than most people and so I says all right, we'll
go to Atlantic City and we'll be on the one twenty train to-morrow.

"Thats sweet, dearie!" says Maison. "We'll get a swell rest!"

Then she set sail and was off with a Jewish gentleman friend, which had
been waiting at the entrance all this time with a gardenia in his
buttonhole. And Ma and me called for the check and dogs and limousine
and hitched our way homeward through the traffic to our quiet little
apartment with 7 windows with the beautiful outlook of the river and the
R.R. tracks and etc.

Then while Musette packed only three trunks and my gold-fitted dressing
case and a couple of hat boxes and my specially designed jewellery box
and the travelling hamper for the dogs, we having decided to travel
light and probably not stay over three or four days, Ma went into the
all-tiled kitchen and commenced getting up a little smack of cold beef
and potato salad and fried cheese sandwiches and coffee and a few hot
biscuits and honey so's we wouldn't have to go out and eat, which Ma
certainly loves to do and no cook ever stands it for more than a week
and the current cook's week was up that morning before we went downtown.

Well anyway while she was doing this I went into the drawing-room which
is all fitted up in handsome gold furniture--that the dealer said was
one of the Louis periods. Louis Cohen I guess,--I never remember quite.
And to put a record on the phonograph in the case I had especially built
in the same style at fifty dollars extra and all the instalments paid,
and streached out as good as I could manage to on the chaise loung,
which is a sort of housebroken steamer-chair, and while John Macormik's
own voice sang my little grey home in the west to me in the privacy of
my own home, I thought dreamingly about Jim and how much I was missing
him and how swell we danced together and how kind and loving and brave
he was and how refined, and believe me he's about the