s
Madame Estelle will be if anything happens to Maude! I'm real fond of
the little beauty myself, and if you had been with a circus all the
years I was, you would understand her better!"

Well, believe you me, it wasn't a lack of understanding with me, it was
a religious conviction, and why not, for hadn't them beasts made trouble
beginning with the original eviction of undesirable tenants, and was I
to think it likely that our own janitor would be any more lenient if
Maude was to get, say, as far as the elevator? Keeping snakes never got
a tenant in right yet and loose ones might set the first of May forward
as many months as was necessary. Not to mention my own personal feelings
in the matter, which it's a fact I once broke a contract on the
Small-Time years ago because a snake-charmer come off just as I was
going on and I used to meet her and them in the wings every time.

Well, anyways, I will say it for Ma, she certainly turned in and helped
me make a thorough search for Maude, which was going some for a lady of
her figure. Looking for a vanished snake in a apartment means
considerable gymnastics, because nothing can be overlooked with safety,
and I didn't want that parlor-eel slipping anything over on
me--especially her cold stomach in the middle of the night across my
face, for instance.

So I and Ma looked under all the furniture and in the pedalcase of the
pianola and in the vases and behind the steam radiators, back of the big
gold clock, inside the victrola, under the rugs, back of the pictures on
the wall and every place:--but no Maude. Finally we even took a look out
in the hall, although we knew nobody had opened the front door, and
after that we opened the wall safe where we keep our diamonds in a
stocking, this being a compromise between Ma's habits and my
common-sense. And then we had a peep into the ice-box where Ma found a
saucer of pudding which she had someways overlooked at supper but no
snake.

And after we had felt under the bath-tub with my best lavender umbrella
which what with the limousine it was the first use I ever had for it,
and then taken a forlorn hope into the soiled-clothes hamper, we give it
up, and sat down with ruined georgette blouses and perfectly wild
looking hair and all heated up like a couple of wrestlers. Any one
coming in then would of thought we had been indulging in a family
discussion of some kind, and for a matter of that it's the truth. I said
a few raw remarks