“‘Jawn,’” he said.
“‘Jawn’ what?”
“I’ll have to consider,” he smiled knowingly. “No doubt Mr. Dick has arranged all that. I mustn’t commit myself just yet. For the time being you may call me ‘Jawn.’”
Phœbe darted suddenly to this side of the big porch and then to the other, looking carefully about the central pillars, “Non” and “Da,” all to induce “Jawn” to inquire the reason, as he well knew.
“What’s the game?” he asked. “Solitaire hide-and-seek?”
“I’m lookin’ for the man with the box?” she said; “the one that grinds out the pictures. Maybe you don’t know it, young man, but we’re both of us in a moving-picture story. One villain has just escaped by swimming the Lake; another—that’s you—comes up with an assumed name; mistakes me first for the cook and then for the heiress and is about to enter and make off with the family jewels. If a fillum man doesn’t get this he’s missin’ a good story. But come in! And wipe your feet on that mat! Your heart may be black”—the two good-natured faces fairly beamed at each other, belying any literal meaning in the words—“but that’s the Lord’s business. At least I can see to it that your feet are clean.”
These were two different types of American Irish. “Jawn” was the pure breed, one generation out of the peat-bogs, but speeded forward a thousand years by the magic of America; Phœbe was the refined gold of the Celt untarnished by a dozen strains of alien blood. But they were playboys, both of them. A fantastic attitude towards the world was to them more serious and important than all the workaday habits of smug other-peoples. They came of a race who have the saddest thoughts on the ineffectiveness of living, and present the gayest face to the whole dull business. And both were on a holiday, “Jawn” freed from the psychological clinic, and Phœbe fluttering with unaccustomed wings after ten years of captivity.
“Wait!” cried “Jawn,” suspending operations on the mat. “I feel a limerick coming! It’s a disease.” He mumbled and rolled his eyes, then brightened up as the rhymes came out properly.
One glance at Phœbe’s illuminated face would be convincing enough that she was enjoying hugely this bit of impromptu and apropos doggerel. But she shook her head dolorously and sighed.
“It is sure a disease,” she said; “are you taken often with the fit?”