“So, me beauty, you two were in cahoots, huh? That's the second low-down deal you've handed me. I haven't forgotten that trick you turned with Nussbaum at DeKalb. Never mind, little girl. I'll get back at you yet.”
He nodded a contemptuous head in Jock's direction. “Carrying a packer?”
[Illustration: “'Come on out of here, and I'll lick the shine off your shoes, you blue-eyed babe, you!'”]
Emma McChesney wiped her fingers daintily on her napkin, crushed it on the table, and leaned back in her chair. “Men,” she observed, wonderingly, “are the cussedest creatures. This chap occupied the same room with you last night and you don't even know his name. Funny! If two strange women had found themselves occupying the same room for a night they wouldn't have got to the kimono and back hair stage before they would not only have known each other's name, but they'd have tried on each other's hats, swapped corset cover patterns, found mutual friends living in Dayton, Ohio, taught each other a new Irish crochet stitch, showed their family photographs, told how their married sister's little girl nearly died with swollen glands, and divided off the mirror into two sections to paste their newly washed handkerchiefs on. Don't tell _me_ men have a genius for friendship.”
“Well, who is he?” insisted Ed Meyers. “He told me everything but his name this morning. I wish I had throttled him with a bunch of Bisons' badges last night.”
“His name,” smiled Emma McChesney, “is Jock McChesney. He's my one and only son, and he's put through his first little business deal this morning just to show his mother that he can be a help to his folks if he wants to. Now, Ed Meyers, if you're going to have apoplexy don't you go and have it around this table. My boy is only on his second piece of pie, and I won't have his appetite spoiled.”
Some one--probably one of those Frenchmen whose life job it was to make epigrams---once said that there are but two kinds of women: good women, and bad women. Ever since then problem playwrights have been putting that fiction into the mouths of wronged husbands and building their “big scene” around it. But don't you believe it. There are four kinds: good women, bad women, good bad women, and bad good women. And the worst of these is the last. This should be a story of all four kinds, and when it is finished I defy you to discover which is which.