After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts over the Wirzburger.
“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 merely 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”
