“Well?” he demanded.
“So I am here to implore you to be just, to be generous,” resumed the girl, slightly raising the pitch of the scene as she approached a climax. “I throw myself on your mercy. I, Enid Conover——”
“Enid Conover!” snorted the Railroader. “Why——”
“Yes. Enid Conover! How I have learned to love that name!”
“Have, hey? Then take my advice, young woman, and stifle that same wild adoration for my poetic cognomen, for you aren’t going to have the renting of it any longer’n I can help.”
“Not——?”
“Oh, you’ll get over it easy! Just as you got over your love for that high-sounding title, Enid Montmorency. And just as, before that, when you left your mother’s Germantown boarding-house, you got over any passion you may have had for your original name, Emma Higgs. You see I know some little about you. I took the trouble to have you looked up. You and your family. You told Gerald your family’s old. From all I hear, I guess the main difference between you and that same family is that one’s older’n you make out and the other’s younger. Take your choice as to which is which. And now——”
“You insult me!” declaimed the girl, her eyes flashing, her figure drawn to the full height of a really excellent pose, her pompadour nestling protectingly above the arched brow.
“No, I don’t. I couldn’t. (Jerry, you sit down there and behave yourself or I’ll spank you!) If you think I’m wrong, maybe you’d like me to tell my son the way you first happened to go on the stage. No? I guess I’ve got this thing framed up pretty near straight. It’s a grand-stand play, and Papa is It, eh? A masterstroke of surprise for the old man, and a final tableau of the bunch of us clustering about you and Gerald in the centre of the stage, while you fall on each other’s necks and do a unison exclamation of ‘God-bless-the-dear-old-Dad! How-much-will-he-leave-us? And-how-soon?’ You waited in town awhile. But Papa didn’t relent and send Hubby back to his lonely wifie. Then you sick Gerald on to acting like a human being, hoping to win Papa over by being a good boy. No go. Then as a last play you butt in here on a sudden with all your lines learned down pat, and do a grand appeal. Well, Mrs.-Miss-Emma-Higgs-Enid-Montmorency-Conover, it doesn’t work. That’s all. If you’ve got the sense I think, you’ll see the show’s a frost, and you’ll start back for Broadway. Take my blessing, if you want it, and take Jerry along for good measure, if you like. It’s all you’ll ever get from me, either of you.”
To Caleb Conover’s unbounded horror and amaze, Enid, instead of spurning him haughtily, burst into a crescendo, throaty gurgle of contralto weeping, and flung herself bodily upon him; her long-gloved arms twining about his neck, her pompadoured head snuggling into his bosom.