up to the apartment. We had to squeeze our way through a mob of reporters all the way through the halls. That’s one of the things money does for you. Say, do you happen to know a newspaper artist named Lathrop—a tall man with nice eyes and an easy way of talking? No, I don’t remember what paper he works on. Well, all right.
“When we got upstairs Mrs. Brown telephones for the bill right away. It came, and it was $600. I saw the bill. Aunt Maggie fainted. I got her on a lounge and opened the bead-work.
“‘Child,’ says she, when she got back to the world, ‘what was it? A raise of rent or an income-tax?’
“‘Just a little dinner,’ says I. ‘Nothing to worry about—hardly a drop in the bucket-shop. Sit up and take notice—a dispossess notice, if there’s no other kind.’
“But, say, Man, do you know what Aunt Maggie did? She got cold feet! She hustled me out of that Hotel Bonton at nine the next morning. We went to a rooming-house on the lower West Side. She rented one room that had water on the floor below and light on the floor above. After we got moved all you could see in the room was about $1,500 worth of new swell dresses and a one-burner gas-stove.
“Aunt Maggie had had a sudden attack of the hedges. I guess everybody has got to go on a spree once in their life. A man spends his on highballs, and a woman gets woozy on clothes. But with forty million dollars—say! I’d like to have a picture of—but, speaking
