“I see no reason,” said I, when he had concluded, “why that shouldn’t make a rattling good funny story.  Those three people couldn’t have acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real actors in a real theatre.  I’m really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow, and all the players men and women.  ‘The thing’s the play,’ is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare.”

“Try it,” said the reporter.

“I will,” said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a humorous column of it for his paper.

There stands a house near Abingdon Square.  On the ground floor there has been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions and stationery are sold.

One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the store.  The Widow Mayo owned the house and store.  Her daughter Helen was married to Frank Barry.  John Delaney was best man.  Helen was eighteen, and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the headlines of a “Wholesale Female Murderess” story from Butte, Mont.  But after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west side.

Frank Barry and John Delaney were “prominent” young beaux of the same side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other every time the curtain went up.  One who pays his money for orchestra seats and fiction expects this.  That is the first funny idea that has turned up in the story yet.  Both had made a great race for Helen’s hand.  When Frank won, John shook his hand and congratulated him—­honestly, he did.

After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat.  She was getting married in a traveling dress.  She and Frank were going to Old Point Comfort for a week.  Downstairs the usual horde of gibbering cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress gaiters and paper bags of hominy.

Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one, entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or any old place where there are Italian skies and dolce far niente.

It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him.  With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered him by demanding whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people that way.

In a few moments she had him going.  The manliness that had possessed him departed.  He bowed low, and said something about “irresistible impulse” and “forever carry in his heart the memory of”—­and she suggested that he catch the first fire-escape going down.

“I will away,” said John Delaney, “to the furthermost parts of the earth.  I cannot remain near you and know that you are another’s.  I will to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for—­”