“I got a fine scene with the comedian and should score a great personal triumph.  All of us girls are lined up for his entrance in the second act, and when he comes in he walks right over to me and says:  ’Ah, little one.  How are you on the Queen’s wedding day,’ ’Queen’s wedding day,’ that’s my cue, and I say, ’Very well, thank you kindly, noble sire.’  Aint that great?  It takes nearly a whole side.  I was rehearsing it in my apartment this morning with Estelle, but she was so rotten as the comedian that I took away the last $5 I gave her for a tip.

“These menials have no talent in their souls.  Estelle, that’s my maid, says she has no desire to elevate the drama, and she had rather be a maid for a chorus girl any time—­there’s more money in it.  She may be right at that.

“Alla McSweeney is going to start a New Thought Church.  She says that she has a whole flock of new thoughts and it would be quite fashionable to start this new think stunt.  She said she would tell us her new thoughts if she thought we would never breathe a word to a living breathing soul.  Gee, that lets our gang out.

“They couldn’t keep quiet if it killed them.  Honest, for a bunch of knockers, perfect both in single handed knocking and team work, our set has anything bound to the bannister in New York.

“But what care I?  Spring is coming and we will all soon hike to Bath Beach.  Honest, for a country place with all the conveniences of home Bath Beach is the top liner.  You can put a can under your shawl and rush a couple of blocks and always get it full of the best, and if you put butter around the side of the pail the barkeep ignores the fact and goes right ahead.

“I may get a motor boat this summer if Wilbur gets his summer snap at the island.

“Coney, I mean, not Blackwell’s.

“He has never been over there except to take flowers to the Poillon sisters.  They love nature so.  Charlotte says it makes her homesick every time she sees a Joy Line boat go by.

“The benefit season will soon open and any person that has a couple of thousand dollars to pay for a theater can git a benefit for himself and maybe draw down a couple of hundred more.  The benefit for the chorus, girls has gone up in the air, for none of them would acknowledge that they were chorus girls.

“They were either show girls or pony dancers, and that let them out.  Anyway, each girl wanted to bring her maid, and the dressing rooms would have been so full of maids that there would have been no room for the dolls.  I had it all framed up, too.  I had six wine agents and a whisky salesman who guaranteed to appear, and that alone would have made the thing a financial success.  But what could I do?

“Our bunch has been rehearsing five weeks without salaries, and with the excessive taxicab rates we got no money to spend on clothes to wear to the ball, and the wardrobe mistress keeps an awful tab on the costume hampers.