"Certainly not. Indeed, when you consider that the nearest star is several million...."

"All right," said George. "All right. Let it go. And now," he went on simply, "tell me all about her and her people and her house and her dog and what she was like as a child and when she first bobbed her hair and who is her favourite poet and where she went to school and what she likes for breakfast...."

Hamilton Beamish reflected.

"Well, I first knew Molly when her mother was alive."

"Her mother is alive. I've seen her. A woman who looks like Catherine of Russia."

"That's her stepmother. Sigsbee H. married again a couple of years ago."

"Tell me about Sigsbee H."

Hamilton Beamish twirled a dumb-bell thoughtfully.

"Sigsbee H. Waddington," he said, "is one of those men who must, I think, during the formative years of their boyhood have been kicked on the head by a mule. It has been well said of Sigsbee H. Waddington that, if men were dominoes, he would be the double-blank. One of the numerous things about him that rule him out of serious consideration by intelligent persons is the fact that he is a synthetic Westerner."

"A synthetic Westerner?"

"It is a little known, but growing, sub-species akin to the synthetic Southerner,—with which curious type you are doubtless familiar."

"I don't think I am."

"Nonsense. Have you never been in a restaurant where the orchestra played Dixie?"

"Of course."

"Well, then, on such occasions you will have noted that the man who gives a rebel yell and springs on his chair and waves a napkin with flashing eyes is always a suit-and-cloak salesman named Rosenthal or Bechstein who was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and has never been farther South than Far Rockaway. That is the synthetic Southerner."

"I see."

"Sigsbee H. Waddington is a synthetic Westerner. His whole life, with the exception of one summer vacation when he went to Maine, has been spent in New York State: and yet, to listen to him, you 

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