So we’re all delighted and go out and get in a couple of taxicabs, Ben and this city man going in the first one.  When ours gets to the theatre Ben is paying the driver while the New Yorker feebly protests that he ought to pay his half of the bill, but Ben don’t hear him and don’t hear him again when he wants to pay for his own seat in the theatre.  I got my first suspicion of this guy right there; for a genuine New Yorker he was too darned conscientious about paying his mere share of everything.  You can say lots of things about New Yorkers, but all that I’ve ever met have been keenly and instantly sensitive to the presence of a determined buyer.  Still I didn’t think so much about it at that moment.  This one looked the part all right, with his slim clothes and his natty cloth hat and the thin gold cigarette case held gracefully open.  Then we get into the theatre.  Of course Ben had bought a box, that being the only place, he says, that a gentleman can set, owing to the skimpy notions of theatre-seat builders.  And we was all prepared for a merry evening at this entertainment which the wise New Yorker would be sure to know was a good one.

But that curtain hadn’t been up three minutes before I get my next shock of disbelief about this well-known club man.  You know what a good play means in New York:  a rattling musical comedy with lively songs, a tenor naval lieutenant in a white uniform, some real funny comedians, and a lot of girls without their stockings on, and so forth.  Any one that thinks of a play in New York thinks of that, don’t he?  And what do we get here and now?  Why, we get a gruesome thing about a ruined home with the owner going bankrupt over the telephone that’s connected with Wall Street, and a fluffy wife that has a magnetic gentleman friend in a sport suit, and a lady crook that has had husband in her toils, only he sees it all now, and tears and strangulations and divorce, and a faithful old butler that suffers keenly and would go on doing it without a cent of wages if he could only bring every one together again, and a shot up in the bathroom or somewhere and gripping moments and so forth—­I want to tell you we was all painfully shocked by this break of the knowing New Yorker.  We could hardly believe it was true during the first act.  Jeff Tuttle kept wanting to know when the girls was coming on, and didn’t they have a muscle dancer in the piece.  Ben himself was highly embarrassed and even suspicious for a minute.  He looks at the New Yorker sharply and says ain’t that a crocheted necktie he’s wearing, and the New Yorker says it is and was made for him by his aunt.  But Ben ain’t got the heart to question him any further.  He puts away his base suspicions and tries to get the New Yorker to tell us all about what a good play this is so we’ll feel more entertained.  So the lad tells us the leading woman is a sterling actress of legitimate methods—­all too hard to find in this day of sensationalism, and the play is a triumph of advanced realism written by a serious student of the drama that is trying to save our stage from commercial degradation.  He explained a lot about the lesson of the play.  Near as I could make out the lesson was that divorce, nowadays, is darned near as uncertain as marriage itself.