So Chris had to stay awake and see that, all about a lassie who worked in New York and was awful poor but awful respectable, though she seemed to live in a place like a palace with a bath ten feet in length and three deep, and wore underclothes that she couldn’t have afforded, some childe had paid for them on the sly. But the picture said No, through its nose, not her, she was awful chaste but sore chased as well, a beast of a man in her office, the manager, galloping about the screen and aye wanting to seduce the lassie by night or by day. And instead of letting him and getting it over or taking him a crack in the jaw and leaving, she kept coming home in tears to the bath, and taking off her underthings one by one, but hiding her breasts and her bottom, fair chaste. Syne she met with a man that managed a theatre, though he looked from his face as though he managed a piggery and had been born in one and promoted for merit, a flat cold slob of a ham of a face with little eyes twinkling in the slob like currants, he was the hero and awful brave, and he took the lass to the theatre and made her sing that the skies were black and she was blue, and something that rhymed with that, not spew, and all the theatre audiences went wild not with rage, but joy, they’d been dropped on their heads when young: and the lassie became a famous actress and the film did a sudden close-up of her face with a tear of gratitude two feet long trembling like a jelly from her lower eyelid. And she and the slob were getting on fine, all black and blue, my lovely Lu, when along came the leader of a birn of brutes, a gang, and kidnapped the lass, grinding his teeth in an awful stamash to sleep with her; and took her away to an underground den; and was just about to begin at last, and Chris was just thinking it fairly was time, would they never get the job over and done?—when in rushed the hero and a fight began and chairs were smashed and vases and noses, and the lass crouched down with her camiknicks showing, but respectable still, she wouldn’t yield an inch to anything short of a marriage licence. And that she got in the end, all fine, with showers of flowers and the man with the face like a mislaid ham cuddling her up with a kiss that looked as though he was eating his supper when the thing came banging to an end at last.

Ma said God be here, now wasn’t that fine? It must be a right canty place, this New York, childes charging about like bulls in a park trying to grab any lass they saw—even though the creatures were all bone and no breast and would give a man as much joy in bed as a kipper out of an ice-box, you’d think. Ay, she’d fair made a mistake a twenty years back when she stopped her Jim emigrating, faith. He’d been keen as anything on going to America, a man had loaned him a bit of a book about Presidents being just plain working folk, born in cabins and the queerest places; and maybe Jim thought that he had a chance, he’d been born next door to a cabin, near, his mother was bairned on the trawler Jess. But Ma’d put him off, like a meikle fool, to think she might now have been out in New York with big Jews chasing her in motor-cars and offering to buy her her undies free…. And God, the bit show was over, it seemed.