“It can’t hurt no more than them hatpins,” he says.
Well, when the paper come the next mornin’ my Missus had to grab it up and turn right away to the place where the op’ras is wrote up. Under the article they was a list o’ the ladies and gents in the boxes and what they wore, but it didn’t say nothin’ about what the gents wore, only the ladies. Prob’ly the ladies happened to have the most comical costumes that night, but I bet if the reporters could of saw Hatch they would of gave him a page to himself.
“Is your name there?” I says to the Missus.
“O’ course not,” she says. “They wasn’t none o’ them reporters tall enough to see us. You got to set in a box to be mentioned.”
“Well,” I says, “you don’t care nothin’ about bein’ mentioned, do you?”
“O’ course not,” she says; but I could tell from how she said it that she wouldn’t run downtown and horsewhip the editor if he made a mistake and printed about she and her costume; her costume wouldn’t of et up all the space he had neither.
“How much does box seats cost?” I ast her.
“About six or seven dollars,” she says.
“Well,” I says, “let’s I and you show Hatch up.”
“What do you mean?” she says.
“I mean we should ought to return the compliment,” says I. “We should ought to give them a party right back.”
“We’d be broke for six weeks,” she says.
“Oh, we’d do it with their money like they done it with ours,” I says.