"They laugh," he said. "They like to see you as the wife of Ali Baba, finding pawntickets in your husband's pockets and charging him with spending his money on flappers?" "They laugh," he said. "They like to see you, as The Widow Twankay, visit a race meeting and get welshed and have your clothes torn off?" "They laugh," he said. "They like to see you, as Dick Whittington's mother, telling the cat that, if he must eat onions, at any rate he can refrain from kissing her?" "They laugh," he said. "They like to see you, as the dame in _Goody Two Shoes_, open a night club on the strict understanding that it is only for clergymen's daughters in need of recreation?" "They laugh," he said again. "But they don't know what you mean?" "No. But I'm funny. That's what you don't seem to understand. I'm so funny that everything I say and do makes them laugh. It doesn't, in fact, matter _what_ I say." "Ah!" I replied, "I have you there! In that case why don't you say a few simpler and sweeter things?" He seemed perplexed. "Things," I explained, "that don't want quite so much knowledge of the seamy side of life?" "Go on!" he said derisively. "I haven't got time to mug _that_ up. I've got my living to get. You don't suppose I invent my jokes, do you? I collect them. I'm on the Halls the rest of the year, and I hear them there. There hasn't been a new joke in a pantomime these twenty years. But what you don't seem to get into your head, mister, is the fact that I make them laugh. Laugh. I'm a scream, I tell you." "And laughter is all you want?" I asked. "I must either make people laugh or get 'the bird.'" "But hasn't it ever occurred to you," I said, "that children in a theatre at Christmas time are entitled to have a little fun that is not wholly connected with sordid domestic affairs and pothouse commonness?" "Never," he said, and I believed him. "Haven't you children of your own?" "Several." "And is that how you amuse them at home?" "Of course not. They're too young." "How old are they?" "From six to thirteen." "But that's the age of the children who go to pantomimes," I suggested. "Well, it's different in your own home," he said. "Besides," he added, "it isn't children I aim at in my jokes. There's other things for them: the fairy ballets, the comic dog." "And what is the audience you aim at?" I asked. "I suppose there is one definite figure you have in your mind's eye?" "Yes," he said, "there is one. The person in the audience that I always aim at is the silly servant-girl in the front row of the gallery. That's why I so often say 'girls' before I make a joke. You've heard me, haven't you?" "Haven't I?" I groaned. * * * * * THE GAME LICENCE.