“See here, you two,” she challenged, “what’s the joke?” For a brief instant a glint of hurt suspicion sprang into her dark eyes. It snapped out as quickly as it had appeared. She said good-humoredly, “Why not tell it to the gang? Then we can all laugh. Is it an Irish joke on Leslie?”
“It is, indeed. Midget and I made it up in Ireland.” Leila flashed Leslie a tantalizing smile.
“Well?” Leslie urged expectantly. “Shoot it at me.”
“Now I warn you, beforehand, that if you should not like our joke it would be a sorry joke on me,” Leila fixed comically-concerned eyes on Leslie.
“I’m already beginning to feel doubtful about it. You’d better shoot,” Leslie warningly advised.
“It seems that I had.” Leila looked solemnly impressed. “Well, it was this way: One day while Midget and I were wandering around the edge of a deep green bog,” Leila began, story fashion, “I said to Midget, ‘Does it not seem hard to you that your friend, Leila, should have to write plays and be a theatrical manager, too?’ ‘It does,’ she said. ‘I can see you will be in a bog as deep as the one over there when you go back to Hamilton.’ ‘What a comfort you are to me, Midget,’ I said with a deep sigh. ‘I have often thought so,’ she replied gently.”
A funny little treble giggle from Vera broke Leila up in the midst of her recital. She burst out laughing, her companions joining in the wave of mirth that swept the big room.
“Now I have lost the thread of my tale,” Leila declared after two or three mirthfully-ineffectual attempts at continuing it. “Where was I at? Ah, yes, I then said to Midget: ‘I should be one, or the other, but not both.’ She said, ‘Quite true, but don’t ask me to be the one you decide not to be. I cannot write plays, and it is all I can do to manage my own affairs.’ ‘Be aisy,’ I said with a fine touch of brogue. ‘You are not my idea of either.’ ‘Thank goodness,’ she said, not at all peevish. ‘I feel that I was intended to be a playwright,’ I said. ‘I am that temperamental!’ ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘I have no genius for managing,’ I confessed. ‘I cannot contradict you,’ said Midget. ‘You had best turn that delicate little job over to someone else who has.’”
Leila paused. Her genial smile flashed broadly into evidence. Her eyes strayed inquiringly to Marjorie.
The latter was leaning forward in her chair, a lovely picture of delighted animation. “Oh, Leila!” she exclaimed. “How perfectly splendid!”