Page:The Leather Pushers (1921).pdf/331

 have ducked the adjoinin' sex all my life, thereby missin' a lot of fun and a equal amount of trouble. Whilst I am hesitatin', the doorkeeper butts in with the information that since he has been holdin' down his present portfolio he has seen more breath-takin' young women than Flo Ziegfeld ever did, but the girl which was waitin' to see Kid Roberts would of made Columbus forget what he sailed from Spain for. After hearin' this sensational piece of news, I figured it was no more than polite to see what the young lady wished.

I barely got time to smooth my hair when into the dressin' room steps what all the poets thinks Eve looked like, except, of course, she was dressed different. They is no more use of me attemptin' to describe Joan Stillwell than they is of me tryin' to cross the Pacific on a motorcycle. I may give you a faint idea of her when I say that, hard-boiled as I am, she looked as good to my startled eyes as Venus, $5,000 a week, a California sunset, all the peaches and cream in the world, the Prince of Wales's future, Rockefeller's bank roll, and Mary Pickford! A set of classy scenery in no ways concealed a—eh—figure which would of drove Helen from Troy to suicide, and I suppose when Joan reads this she'll laugh herself sick.

Anyways, boys and girls, by the time she had raised a pair of blue eyes which give me more kick than I ever got over a bar before the plague, I am as short of breath as I am of degrees from Oxford.

"Oh—pardon me, is Mister Roberts here?" she asks, gettin' a bit red under my dumfounded stare.

"He is for all I know," I says, with a goofy grin. "Look around—I'm dizzy!"