“Please don’t,” he murmured. “Please don’t, I pray. It would embarrass me fearfully.”
The stout party turned to his companion and spoke quietly under the cover of his hand.
“Nuts,” he confided. “Pure Brazilian.”
Jimmy bade J. Herbert Denby a most enthusiastic farewell at the station in Baltimore.
“There’s a dinner coming to you, old George B. Bookworm,” he shouted as he jumped into a taxicab, “a nice young dinner with a little grape on the sidelines and no stops for way-stations when we get our feet under the table. See you later, old dear.”
Chapter Thirteen
Jimmy arrived at the Lyric Theatre in that glow of exultant feeling which every great artist should feel when driven to accomplishment by the urge of a great imaginative idea. He dashed through the lobby, pushed his way through a swinging door adjoining the ticket window marked “Manager’s Office” and leaned over a desk at which was seated a slender man with what might be called the old-young face, a face on which disillusionment and blase boredom seemed indelibly stamped. This was George Seymour, manager of the theatre, popularly known among traveling press agents as the “human icicle” because of his inborn and inherent distaste for humanity as a whole and for publicity men in particular. Mr. Seymour was going over a set of plans for the remodeling of the entrance of the theatre with an architect, and seemed supremely busy, but this little detail didn’t phase Jimmy.
“Well, Georgie, old man,” he said breezily, “here we are back again and this time we’ve brought the big idea along for a little visit. I want you to meet him.”
He slipped his hat down on the blueprint in front of Mr. Seymour, completely obliterating the graceful outlines of the architect’s new front elevation and swung himself up to a seat on the edge of the desk. A dangerous glint crept into Mr. Seymour’s eyes as he unconsciously fingered a heavy brass paperweight to the right of Jimmy’s hat.