. "It's too hot to sleep," she said.
She began to disrobe languidly. Her eye fell on the scrap of paper
pinned to her pillow. She went over to it, curiously, leaned over, read
it.

"Oh, look, Hugo!" She gave a little tremulous laugh that was more than
half sob. He came over to her and read it, his arm around her shoulder.

"My son Hugo and my daughter Lil they are the best son and daughter in
the world."

A sudden hot haze before his eyes blotted out the words as he finished
reading them.

YOU'VE GOT TO BE SELFISH

When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi
Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the
personalities helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in
newspaper parlance as national figures. One n.f. is enough for any short
story. Three would swamp a book. It's like one of those plays advertised
as having an all-star cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and
been greeted, and done his twinkling the play has faded into the
background. You can't see the heavens for the stars.

Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honour at a dinner, needs no
introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been
described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on
Page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though
quoted, thus:

"Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a
genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive,
artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very
force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the
eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a
comic ol' clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to
a vice."

Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine
diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say,
"It's scarlet! No--it's blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--"

That was Sid Hahn.

I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his
likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the
theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and
top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black
cigar--unlighted--in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone
interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include!) knew
all about Sid Hahn--and not