“Well—anyway—,” she said, “I’m going to see how it works—for a little while. Maybe there isn’t going to be any career for me beyond—well, beyond ‘Secret Service Sallie.’ If there isn’t I might possibly——”
She paused thoughtfully. Jimmy’s scornful mood had passed and he looked at her appealingly.
“You might possibly what?” he ventured, cautiously. “There isn’t goin’ to be another catch in it, is there?”
“I’m afraid there is,” she replied, quietly. “You’ll have to settle down some place first. I don’t think I’d ever learn how to keep house permanently in a hotel bed-room and besides——”
Again a disturbing pause. Jimmy was rapidly becoming a pitiful object to behold.
“Get it all out of your system, sister,” he said, weakly. “I’m a glutton for punishment.”
“Well,” she resumed evenly, “besides settling down you’d have to have some money in the bank—quite a little. That’s the most important thing. There was a girl in our town once who ran off with a fellow in the show business and lived a hand-to-mouth sort of a life for several seasons after passing up a lot of good chances among the boys she knew. She’s back selling stockings in Boyd’s Emporium on First avenue now and she looks kind of faded out and tired. I like you a lot, Jimmy, and you’ve treated me better than I deserved and you’re the nicest fellow I ever knew, but we’ve got to be sensible and wait and see how things work out. Won’t you—please?”
The “please” was long drawn out and a bit plaintive. It touched the heart-strings of the hapless press agent and played a tender little strain upon them. He meekly agreed to all the qualifying clauses in the agreement and he would have signed on the dotted line if they had been three times as numerous.
Filled with a new enthusiasm his imagination began to run riot and within two weeks his surprise assaults upon the front line trenches of the forces defending the serried columns of the metropolitan daily newspapers resulted in space returns that established new records.
He contrived to have a member of the President’s cabinet who happened to take a ride on the Dippy Dip stalled in his gondola one hundred and seventy-five feet in the air for half an hour while a squad of mechanicians labored feverishly to get things straightened out. That landed on the front page of every paper in town. He married off the Armless Wonder in Bisbee’s Carnival of Freaks to the Legless Marvel with a new result of six “picture spreads” and five and a half columns of solid reading matter. His discovery that the little dark-haired girl who danced on the open air stage in the big free show every afternoon and evening was the daughter of a grand duke who had fled in disguise from Soviet Russia and who had feared to reveal her identity because of the possibility of attack by Bolshevik sympathizers in this country was his biggest coup, however. This was sensationally played up for all it was worth and considerably more in every New York daily and had been telegraphed all over the country. As a “follow-up” on this he arranged to have two uniformed guards accompany the young woman wherever she went. This, too, landed heavily and Jimmy’s customary high opinion of his own prowess was perhaps more noticeable than ever.