Ma Pettengill. Harry Leon Wilson

      Then we had a nice talk about Clyde. She'd had no word for a year now, the last being a picture card saying he would spend the winter in Egypt with some well-known capitalists that wouldn't take no for an answer. And did I believe he might now be wandering over the face of the earth, sick and worn, and trying to get back to her; didn't I think some day he would drag himself to her door, a mere wreck of his former self, to be soothed at last on her breast? That was why she kept a light burning in the front window of this here bungalow. He would know she had waited.

      Well, I'd never said a word against Clyde except in conversation with myself, and I wasn't going to break out now. I did go so far as to hint that an article that had come out about her in this same magazine might draw Clyde back a little quicker than the light in the window. The article said her salary was enormous. I thought its rays might carry.

      So I come home again and near a year later I get a telegram from Vida: "Happy at last—my own has come home to me." I threw up my hands and swore when I read this. The article had said her salary was seven hundred and fifty dollars a week.

      The next winter I run down to see the happy couple. Vida was now looking a good forty, but Clyde was actually looking younger than ever; not a line nor a wrinkle to show how he had grieved for her, and not a sign of writer's cramp from these three picture cards he had sent her in five years. She'd been afraid he'd come back worn to the bone.

      But listen! By the time I got there Clyde was also drawing money. He'd felt a little hurt at first to find his wife a common actress, and asked to see her contract because you couldn't believe what you see in these magazines. Then he'd gone round the lot and got to be an actor himself. I gathered that he hadn't been well liked by the men at first, and two or three other directors, when Vida insisted he should have a chance to act, had put him into rough-house funny plays where he got thrown downstairs or had bricks fall on him, or got beat up by a willing ex-prize fighter, or a basket of eggs over his head, or custard pies in his perfect features, with bruises and sprains and broken bones and so forth—I believe the first week they broke everything but his contract.

      Anyway, when he begun to think he wasn't meant for this art, who steps in but this same director that had made such a beast of himself with Vida? He puts Clyde into a play in which Vida is the mother and Clyde is the noble son that takes the crime on his shoulders to screen the brother of the girl he loves, and it was an awful hit. Naturally Vida was never so good before and Clyde proved to be another find. He can straighten up and look nobler when he's wrongfully accused of a crime than any still actor I ever see. He's got now to where they have to handle him with gloves or he'd leave 'em flat and go with another company. Vida wrote me only last week that they had a play for him where he's cast off on a desert island with a beautiful but haughty heiress, and they have to live there three months subsisting on edible foods which are found on all desert islands. But Clyde had refused the part because he would have to grow whiskers in this three months. He said he had to think of his public, which would resent this hideous desecration. He thought up a bully way to get out of it. He said he'd let the whiskers grow for a few scenes and then find a case of safety razors washed ashore, so he could shave himself just before the haughty millionaire's daughter confessed that she had loved him from the first and the excursion steamer come up to rescue 'em. I believe he now admits frankly that he wrote most of the play, or at least wrote the punch into it. A very happy couple they are, Clyde having only one vice, which is candy that threatens his waistline. Vida keeps a sharp watch on him, but he bribes people to sneak chocolate creams into his dressing room. The last night I was there he sung "Good-night, Good-night, Beloved!" so well that I choked up myself.

      Of course women are crazy about him; but that don't bother Vida a little bit. She never wanted a husband anyway—only a son. And Clyde must have had something wake up in his brain them years he was away. He had a queer look in his eyes one night when he said to me—where Vida couldn't hear: "Yes, other women have loved me, but she—she knows me and loves me!" It's the only thing I ever heard him utter that would show he might be above a pet kitten in intellect.

      And, of course, these letters he gets don't mean anything in his life but advertising—Oh, yes! I forgot to tell you that his stage name is J. Harold Armytage. He thought it up himself. And the letters coming in by the bushel really make Vida proud. In her heart she's sorry for the poor fools because they can't have as much of dear Clyde as she has. She says she's never deserved her present happiness. I never know whether I agree with her or not.

      She's a queer one. Darned if she don't make a person think sometimes—listening to her chatter—that there must be something kind of decent about human nature after all!