“Who is it?” I’d whisper.
“That’s Mrs. Vandeventer,” the Wife’d say. “Her husband’s the biggest streetcar conductor in Philadelphia.”
Or somebody’d set beside us at the beach or in the Palm Garden and my ribs would be all battered up before the Missus was calm enough to tip me off.
“The Vincents,” she’d say; “the canned prune people.”
It was a little bit thrillin’ at first to be rubbin’ elbows with all them celeb’s; but it got so finally that I could walk out o’ the dinin’ room right behind Scotti, the opera singer, without forgettin’ that my feet hurt.
The Washington’s Birthday Ball brought ’em all together at once, and the Missus pointed out eight and nine at a time and got me so mixed up that I didn’t know Pat Vanderbilt from Maggie Rockefeller. The only one you couldn’t make no mistake about was a Russian count that you couldn’t pronounce. He was buyin’ bay mules or somethin’ for the Russian government, and he was in ambush.
“They say he can’t hardly speak a word of English,” says the Missus.
“If I knowed the word for barber shop in Russia,” says I, “I’d tell him they was one in this hotel.”