quick as a wink; you’d have smothered laughing. I am disinclined to make excavations into the insides of a personal affection. I am glued to the theory that the diversions and discrepancies of the indisposition known as love should be as private a sentiment as a toothbrush. ’Tis my opinion that the biographies of the heart should be confined with the historical romances of the liver to the advertising pages of the magazines. So, you’ll excuse the lack of an itemised bill of my feelings toward Mame.
“Pretty soon I got a regular habit of dropping into the tent to eat at irregular times when there wasn’t so many around. Mame would sail in with a smile, in a black dress and white apron, and say: ‘Hello, Jeff—why don’t you come at mealtime? Want to see how much trouble you can be, of course. Friedchickenbeefsteakporkchopshamandeggspotpie’—and so on. She called me Jeff, but there was no significations attached. Designations was all she meant. The front names of any of us she used as they came to hand. I’d eat about two meals before I left, and string ’em out like a society spread where they change plates and wives, and josh one another festively between bites. Mame stood for it, pleasant, for it wasn’t up to her to take any canvas off the tent by declining dollars just because they were chipped in after meal times.
“It wasn’t long until there was another fellow named Ed Collier got the between-meals affliction,
