Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/164

138 apprenticeship on Mulberry Street my pockets were rifled every night, I had not now for nearly a year suffered the theft of even a copper. And why should I entertain even the shadow of a suspicion of "Tom" whom I wholeheartedly accepted as an unsophisticated youth recently from the Mohawk valley and to whom I had pledged the usufruct of my fairly good earning capacity to enable him to live like a nabob? For more than an hour, on the park bench, he had demonstrated himself supergenial. He had seemed so glad and so grateful over what I had promised: To lift him from the slums to an honored professional career. The story of his life did contain some inconsistencies but I realized it only too late.

As soon as we arrived in an unlighted stone-yard and there was not another soul within hearing—at least we had seen no one for the last five hundred feet—Harvey Green suddenly changed to just the opposite of his supergenial and ultra-grateful mask. Only at the moment that he had me completely at his mercy did he disclose himself as a dyed-in-the-wool criminal—a fiend who would never give a second thought to having just committed a murder.

Since I had expected to take him under my own roof and acquaint him with my every-day professional personality, I had not gone to the extremes of frivolous female-impersonation customary before young bloods who would never meet me in every-day life. I had feared I would forfeit his respect. Thus I had bidden him call me "Ralph"—not "Jennie."

"Ralph, what a ya think when I say I've served time in Elmira Reformatory? I kin prove what kinder man I am! Reach your hand here and feel this terrible