for half
an hour at a time when I was sitting, reading, or looking at the
magazines.

"One time I says to her: 'Do I remind you of some deceased relative
or friend of your childhood, Mrs. Brown? I've noticed you give me a
pretty good optical inspection from time to time.'

"'You have a face,' she says, 'exactly like a dear friend of
mine--the best friend I ever had. But I like you for yourself,
child, too,' she says.

"And say, Man, what do you suppose she did? Loosened up like a
Marcel wave in the surf at Coney. She took me to a swell dressmaker
and gave her _a la carte_ to fit me out--money no object. They were
rush orders, and madame locked the front door and put the whole
force to work.

"Then we moved to--where do you think?--no; guess again--that's
right--the Hotel Bonton. We had a six-room apartment; and it cost
$100 a day. I saw the bill. I began to love that old lady.

"And then, Man, when my dresses began to come in--oh, I won't tell
you about 'em! you couldn't understand. And I began to call her
Aunt Maggie. You've read about Cinderella, of course. Well, what
Cinderella said when the prince fitted that 3-1/2 A on her foot was
a hard-luck story compared to the things I told myself.

"Then Aunt Maggie says she is going to give me a coming-out banquet
in the Bonton that'll make moving Vans of all the old Dutch families
on Fifth Avenue.

"'I've been out before, Aunt Maggie,' says I. 'But I'll come out
again. But you know,' says I, 'that this is one of the swellest
hotels in the city. And you know--pardon me--that it's hard to get
a bunch of notables together unless you've trained for it.'

"'Don't fret about that, child,' says Aunt Maggie. 'I don't send
out invitations--I issue orders. I'll have fifty guests here that
couldn't be brought together again at any reception unless it were
given by King Edward or William Travers Jerome. They are men, of
course, and all of 'em either owe me money or intend to. Some of
their wives won't come, but a good many will.'

"Well, I wish you could have been at that banquet. The dinner
service was all gold and cut glass. There were about forty men and
eight ladies present besides Aunt Maggie and I. You'd never have
known the third richest woman in the world. She had on a new black
silk dress with so much passementerie on it that it sounded exactly
like a hailstorm I heard once when I was staying all night with a
girl that lived in a top-floor studio.

"And my dres