get welshed and have your clothes torn off?"

"They laugh," he said.

"They like to see you, as Dick Whittington's mother, telling the cat
that, if he must eat onions, at any rate he can refrain from kissing
her?"

"They laugh," he said.

"They like to see you, as the dame in _Goody Two Shoes_, open a night
club on the strict understanding that it is only for clergymen's
daughters in need of recreation?"

"They laugh," he said again.

"But they don't know what you mean?"

"No. But I'm funny. That's what you don't seem to understand. I'm so
funny that everything I say and do makes them laugh. It doesn't, in
fact, matter _what_ I say."

"Ah!" I replied, "I have you there! In that case why don't you say a
few simpler and sweeter things?"

He seemed perplexed.

"Things," I explained, "that don't want quite so much knowledge of the
seamy side of life?"