“Everybody had a large bunch of fun kidding me about my inheritance till I was nearly bug.  Why, would you believe it?  I couldn’t go to dinner or riding with a gentleman friend, but some humorous dame sitting at another table would arch her eyebrows and then, if I introduced them to the gent, they would say, ’I am very glad to meet you, Mr. Suchandsuch; how are things in Pittsburg?’

“At last it got so bad that I decided to go back to work and earn my little twenty per, so that I could keep my automobile and wear good clothes without the slightest taint of suspicion on my character.  With that noble end in view I started on the still hunt.  Nothing doing with that traveling thing.

“I tucked my little scrapbook under my arm and sat in the waiting-room.  After hanging around in there for about half an hour I would be permitted to glide into the big boss.  I had a nice little monologue framed up as to my virtues—­no, that’s the wrong word—­ability.

“None of the managers asked me what I had done, but what did I get.

“When I called on the gentlemen by whom I am now employed he said:  ‘Talent?  Oh, piffle!  Can you wear tights?’ He said that to me.

“I merely mentioned that I used to work for Mr. Ziegfeld and he hired me at once.  I didn’t even have to show him my picture taken as Aphrodite in a classical art study.

“I went over to rehearsal, and of all the frowsy dames I ever piped—­far be it from me to knock, but they looked like a bunch of pie-trammers that had just rushed over from Child’s.  The stage manager was a friend of mine, and I asked him when he had started an old ladies’ home, and he told me—­mind you, this is the strictest confidence—­that the divorce courts and the cheap rates from Pittsburg was raising Cain with the crop of merry-merries.

“I was standing over near the piano when the leading lady galloped in.  Believe me the dog she put on would make you think that she had every other star looking like a twinkle, and before she landed where she is now she was leading lady for a moving picture company.

“But the comedian—­honest, when he gets a couple under his belt he is just that funny—­gee!  I nearly howled my head off at him calling the tenor Gertrude.

“Say, he got awfully peevish and was mad enough to crush a grape when he found out that he couldn’t have the ‘spot’ when he does his duet number with the ingenue, and when he found out that he would have to dress with the character comedian, who is a low, coarse brute, always drinking beer in the dressing room and not sharing with anybody, he got so mad I thought he would burst into tears.

“He’s another of these exaggerated ego guys, every move a picture, wears his handkerchief up his sleeve and all that kind of guff.

“The funniest thing about the whole show is that the author is staging the piece, and what he don’t know about the show business would make the Lenox Library look like a news stand He wanted the tenor to hold the prima so she couldn’t show her rings.  And that’s the only thing that got her the job—­her jewelry.