a baby two years old, and if it wasn't for him, she would
go back to the stage. She is awful lonesome up in her fine home, and she
misses the lights and the fun and the pretty dresses. She is crazy over
the clothes the girls are wearing in the new Field show, and I think she
misses the suppers after the shows when a lot of the girls used to go
with the Johnnies and sort of joy ride. There wasn't nothing wrong with
the parties, but her mother-in-law thinks it is awful to even mention
them. A pretty girl like Mildred could have four suppers a night if she
wanted to, because lots of men like to take a show girl out. They wear
pretty clothes and attract attention and are funny, have lots of
up-to-date slang, know all the new songs, and don't expect a man to be
clever. All that they want of him is to pay the supper. And they are
perfectly willing to pay for it if you don't expect them to talk of art
or the uplifting of the drama. Just look pretty and say fool things and
whistle popular songs and say things that don't make their head ache to
answer. I tell Mrs. Smith who, like so many women, think it is always
wrong to go to supper, that it is done by heaps of girls who are on the
level.

I am kind of sorry for Mildred. She is pretty but nothing but a little
butterfly, and Tom's folks don't like her, and make little dabs at her
about being in the chorus, and they are trying to educate her. Read to
her from a man named Emerson and Tennyson and a lot of high brows that
put a kink in her brain that lasts for days. And they think the theatre
is all wrong except things by Ibsen and Shakespeare and a man named
Shaw, and of course Mildred thinks, and so do I, that a funny show where
the comedian makes a monkey of himself and the girls change their
dresses twenty times, and do stunts under the spot light is a lot
decenter than those nasty shows where people turn their feelings inside
out, especially their private feelings that ought not be talked about
in public. She is bound to go back and I had a long talk with her. I
told her that his folks might take the baby away from her, and she
nearly went crazy. She turned on me like a cat, and said, "What do you
mean?" I said that they would like her and Tom to separate and they
would take the baby. She could not speak for a minute then she blazed at
me:

"Take my baby, take Tommy? But he is mine. He is my baby. No one can
take him away from me. I couldn't live without him." I saw that was