“After the olio the Busy Brigade of the Ladies’ Auxiliary took the napkin off a group of sandwiches and a bath tub of lemonade and we all had an awful time with ourselves cracking rare quips.  Me the center of an admiring throng.  They all knew I was an actress and they asked me to act.  You know the extent of my acting, a champagne dance and a burlesque on the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz, and my lines are limited to, ’Oh! girls, here comes the prince, now, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah.’  Therefore I ducked the request to exhibit my art.  I was going home after the show—­I mean entertainment—­and Waldo, the fellow I went with before I got sense enough to blow the burg with a musical comedy—­Waldo started to walk home with me.  I will say this much for Waldo before I go any further, he has a good eye for the future, even though he is working in a grocery store.

“Waldo and I were walking down the quiet country lane, he telling me all the news that had been pulled off while I had been away.  When we got down to the garden gate what do you think came off?  Waldo proposed.  Honest, he proposed, just like that.  Waldo’s intentions were sincere, but his work was lumpy and he went up in his lines a couple of times.  He didn’t pass it out half as strong as these city chaps do when they don’t mean it.  I instructed Waldo to can his chatter and forget it.  Waldo got real indignant because I wouldn’t fly with him and tried to grab me.  Now I hadn’t been prowling about New York alone without learning how to take care of myself, so I gave him the heel and the way he went to the mat was a caution for further orders.  Waldo was a nice boy, but he was rough, so after the jolt he got he had sense enough to beat it.

“Say, I had an awful time for the next two or three days.  But never again.  I’ll never go any further out in the country than Claremont.  These rural districts are for those that like them, but if I can have Broadway for a country lane you won’t hear a peep out of me.  Honest, when I see a car with ‘Forty-second street, crosstown,’ on it I wanted to gallup up and kiss the motorman.

“Well, I’ve got to leave you here.  Will tell you how I happened to leave Emporia the next time I see you.  Take it from me, I had rather be a shine on Broadway than a glare anywhere else.  So long.”

In which Sabrina chronicles some more of the adventures that happened to her while visiting her parents and details how she stood the town on edge, was ejected therefrom, and the remarks she made on the subject.

CHAPTER SIX

“They say a rolling stone gathers no moss, but it’s a cinch that this pebble could have gathered a bunch of lemons since she has fallen into her inheritance if she had but listened to their plaintive plea,” remarked Sabrina, the Show Girl, after we had seated ourselves at the table.

“Has some one been seeking your hand in marriage?” she was asked.