arrogant looking young lady and you tell her to please shine them up
a little. You endeavor to appear as though you had been doing this
at frequent periods stretching through a great number of years, but
she--bless her little heart!--she knows better than that. The female
of the manicuring species is not to be deceived by any such cheap and
transparent artifices. If you wore a peekaboo waist she couldn't see
through you any easier. Your hands would give you away if your face
didn't. In a sibulent aside, she addresses the young lady at the next
table--the one with the nine bracelets and the hair done up delicatessen
store mode--sausages, rolls and buns--whereupon both of them laugh in
a significant, silvery way, and you feel the back of your neck setting
your collar on fire. You can smell the bone button back there scorching
and you're glad it's not celluloid, celluloid being more inflammable and
subject to combustion when subjected to intense heat.

When both have laughed their merry fill, the young woman who has you in
charge looks you right in the eye and says:

"Dearie me; you'll pardon me saying so, but your nails are in a
perfectly turrible state. I don't think I've seen a jumpman's nails in
such a state for ever so long. Pardon me again--but how long has it been
since you had them did?"

To which you reply in what is meant to be a jaunty and off-hand tone:

"Oh quite some little while. I've--I've been out of town."

"That's what I thought," she says with a slight shrug. It isn't so much
what she says--it's the way she says it, the tone and all that, which
makes you feel smaller and smaller until you could crawl into your own
watch pocket and live happily there ever after. There'd be slews of
room and when you wanted the air of an evening you could climb up in a
buttonhole of your vest and be quite cosy and comfortable. But shrink
as you may, there is now no hope of escape, for she has reached out and
grabbed you firmly by the wrist. She has you fast. You have a feeling
that eight or nine thousand people have assembled behind you and are all
gazing fixedly into the small of your back. The only things about you
that haven't shrivelled up are your hands. You can feel them growing
larger and larger and redder and redder and more prominent and
conspicuous every instant.

The lady begins operations. You are astonished to note how many tools
and implements it takes to manicure a pair of hands properly. The top of
h