Page:The Female-Impersonators 1922 book scan.djvu/203

Rh II. The Pug Heaven.

I henceforth visited the Pugilists' Haven one evening each week. After the appropriation of one good suit, I always attired myself rather shabbily. After seven o'clock dinner, I would change to the cast-off apparel and noiselessly glide down the two flights of stairs from my chamber. Fortunately father always had prayers after dinner. While the family were in the prayer-room and all the servants in their dining-room, I succeeded in engineering my exit for an evening's revel with little risk, in my poverty-stricken disguise, of encountering any individual in the halls. No one ever suspected the reason for my absences. It was several times remarked that I had been out late. But I threw the observer off the scent by the pretext of a perambulation to obviate insomnia.

As I proceeded rapidly from my domicile, I would, if I detected a familiar figure advancing, cross to the other side of the street and make a feint of ringing a doorbell. In order, in my dilapidated apparel, to avert the danger of encountering on the public conveyance some one acquainted with my identity, I would perambulate more than a mile in order to attain the Bowery by an east-side car. On the way I would conceal my house-key and an emergency greenback in a crevice in the Central Park stonewall—always the identic cavity in order to be regained with ease.

At Pug Heaven—as my dive was nicknamed—I was universally given a hearty welcome and secured