been jerked off and flung over the back of a chair.

Peter, imprisoned, _might_ have moved the wash-stand and upset the
manuscript--Peter had never put the bed-clothing over the chair, or
broken his own leg.

"Humph!" he said, and getting out his note-book, he made an exact
memorandum of what I had told him, and of the condition of the room.
That done, he turned to me.

"Mrs. Pitman," he said, "I'll thank you to call me Mr. Ladley for the
next day or so. I am an actor out of employment, forty-one years of
age, short, stout, and bald, married to a woman I would like to be
quit of, and I am writing myself a play in which the Shuberts intend
to star me, or in which I intend the Shuberts to star me."

"Very well, Mr. Ladley," I said, trying to enter into the spirit of
the thing, and, God knows, seeing no humor in it. "Then you'll like
your soda from the ice-box?"

"Soda? For what?"

"For your whisky and soda, before you go to bed, sir."

"Oh, certainly, yes. Bring the soda. And--just a moment, Mrs. Pitman:
Mr. Holcombe is a total abstainer, and has always been so. It is
Ladley, not Holcombe, who takes this abominable stuff."

I said I quite understood, but that Mr. Ladley could skip a night, if
he so wished. But the little gentleman would not hear to it, and when