“Honest, there are more dubs around this town who had rather get married than work than there are actors on Broadway now.  I have had three proposals since I have been back, one of marriage.  I told them all ‘no.’  That I preferred to live a la carte.  I could have become a farmer’s bride in Emporia if I had but said the word.  I didn’t tell you how I came to sneak that snare, did I?  You know I went out there with the intention of staying a month, surging around and showing the village belles that May Manton wasn’t the only authority on correct dress.  Ten days was my limit.

“The family and every one agreed that my metropolitan broadmindedness was too much of a strain on the sense of morality of the peasantry, as it were.  No, nothing of the slightest consequence, nothing that would have caused the inhabitants of Broadway to even arch their eyebrows.  All I did was to inhale a snootful and go out with a friend and stand the thriving little village of Emporia up on end and tip it over.  ’Tis a strange tale.  List, and I will unfold it to you.  One day I was wafting slowly and sedately down to the Boston Store for my mail when lo! and behold, what did I see out in front of the Palace Hotel but an automobile.  Believe me when I tell you, it was the first time I had looked a radiator in the face for a week.  Two young fellows were monkeying around the machine, and as they were nice-looking chaps I gave them the furtive glance, and one of them stopped and asked me if he hadn’t been introduced to me in the Harlem Casino.  At any other time I would have taken his remark as a deep insult, inferring as it did that I was so far from Forty-second street, but now I could have fell on his neck and cried with joy.  I told him that I had never met him in the place he had mentioned, but to let it go at that, and if he even knew where Harlem was it was introduction enough.

“Come to find out they were making a trip across the continent, and had stopped there to get a little gasolene for the machine.  We talked things over and I found out that they knew several people I did, and anyway they were from New York and that helped a heap.  They were going to leave that afternoon, but I prevailed upon them to stay over until the next day.  I was invited into the hotel for dinner, and we opened the first bottle of champagne wine, as they say out West, that had been opened in Emporia since the Governor went through.  In truth, the bottle was covered with specks, and the label had faded so you could hardly read it, but when the cork went ‘wop!’ three traveling men at the next table burst into tears.

“After we had consumed all the champagne wine they had in the snare, I tipped them off to a speak-easy, and we decided to ride down there in the machine, and then go for a little tour, as it were.  By this time it had been noised through the city that some one had taken the bottle out of the show window, and a large crowd had assembled to see the plutocrats come forth.  We capered blithely out to the machine, climbed in and hiked for the blind tiger.  After the usual red tape the captain sold us about two quarts of jig-juice—­the kind that makes a jack-rabbit spit in a bulldog’s eye.