Page 15

      A PRIVATE PERFORMANCE
                ELIZABETu F. CORBETT, '10.
  "When we get there," she said, "you must come in and have
something to take the bad taste of that play out of your mouth.
It's fortunate that I don't often have to see and review as bad a
one. But I don't often have a man to hang around the office
while I write up, and whisk me off home in a cab afterward. On
all accounts you've earned your crackers and cheese."
  "Will the Dame be there to greet us ?" he asked.
  "Surely. She'll be glad to see you, even at this time of night.
You suit the Dame's taste for domestic virtues." She smiled,
and his grave, fine, middle-aged face lit up responsively. "I'm
not very domestic myself" she went on, "and the poor lady pines
a little for respectability."
  "I should imagine that a self-supporting woman of thirty-
five "
  "Forty-one," she corrected serenely.
  "Well, your sort of woman isn't exactly her sort. How did
she ever come to live with you ?"
  "Oh, I knew her when I was a kid. She lived near us and she
used to be rather fond of me. I was dreadfully in awe of her,
she was so proper and her house so impossibly neat. She gave
me cookies when I was small, and later she tried to marry me
off to every eligible man in the neighborhood. I'd lost sight
of her completely when, two or three years ago, I got a letter
from my sister saying that her husband had died, and left her
without a blood relation on earth I had money enough and a
spare bed-room so-"
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