atch a live one is when
their hands are tied. Jealous? What! Me? Not so you can notice it, but I
ain't going to have anybody have anything on me, and while I caused no
scenes, I left the impression that I had Wilbur trained so that he would
roll over and play dead at the word of command. While these 'keep off
the grass' signs don't do much good, still they run a horrible bluff.
Did Wilbur get wise to this move on my part? Not on your life! If he
found out that I was, figuratively speaking, riding herd on him, he
would get chesty and all swelled up until it would be my painful duty to
lance him. I don't know yet whether Wilbur is a rhinestone Billie or a
Whisky amber Billie with a dash of bitters Billie, but I am On the Job
Betty, all right, all right.

"Well, to get back to the beefsteak. After all the guests had assembled,
which was maybe some 2 a.m., they started in. It was merely the ordinary
stunt of beer and beefsteak and beefsteak and beer, but the hours were
enlivened by the vaudeville performances of the guests. This was before
the precinct sergeant knocked on the door. One old frump that must have
been tramming a mace in the Roman Hanging Gardens got a yen that was
doing imitations she had Elsie Janis and Gertrude Hoffman looking like a
couple of false starts. Another took the hooks out of her marsel wave
and did that time-worn stunt of 'Laska.' Then one of the chorus men gave
an imitation of George Cohan, as usual. But that don't explain the
scratches; does it?

"To go back sometime, there was a certain skirt that I used to room with
in Chicago when we were both broke, but one night she went out with a
bunch of siss-boom-ah! boys and came home with a large and juicy snoot
full and spent the early morning hours in leaning out of the window of
the apartment and whistling through her fingers to the milkmen, as well
as staging a disrobing number in the middle of the room with the
curtains up to such an extent that the inhabitants of the outlying
districts had to wait sometime for their morning milk.

"This, naturally grated on my refined sensibilities, so the next morning
while she was yet beating the hay, I packed my little suitcase and took
it on the run away from there, leaving her, you might say, on the pan. I
went into the pony ballet of a La Salle Theatre show--can you see me as
a pony?--and I heard that she was advancing Art with a stock burlesque
in South Chicago. That evening she was among those present