“Leila Greatheart, what a dandy coat and hat!” Marjorie cried. She came forward, hands outstretched to meet Leila.
“Here I come with a fine Irish dash.” Leila made a funny cat-like leap into the room and caught Marjorie’s welcoming hands in hers. “It is a hundred years since I saw you; or so it seems,” she said in her whimsical way. “Now I shall say not a word more until I have taken down Jeremiah’s jingle. I happen to have a pencil, and bewitching Bean herself will furnish her Celtic friend with a bit of paper.”
“At your service. Let me conduct you to the writing desk,” Marjorie took Leila’s arm and escorted her to an open antique mahogany desk. She motioned Leila into the mahogany chair before it. “There you are.” She indicated several sizes of pale gray note paper bearing the monogram of the Arms. “Isn’t this beautiful paper, Leila?” she commented. “Miss Susanna put it here on purpose for us. She never uses it. She prefers white. This was Mr. Brooke Hamilton’s own stationary.”
“You are two lucky children in a fairy castle,” Leila declared. “Now say me the jingle, Jeremiah. Then we will talk about everything and anything.”
“Ahem.” Jerry coughed importantly. “I may have to depend upon bewitching Bean to help me. I never remember my own ravings—inspirations, I should say. Inspiration is—it is—well, it just is.”
“Is it?” Leila inquired with raised brows and an engaging grin.
“It certainly is,” Jerry responded with a difficult solemnity. It broke up in an amused high-keyed chuckle. Merely to glance at Leila, posed in an attitude of expectant and ridiculous affability was to laugh.
After one or two hitches and a little prompting from Marjorie who also had designs on Jerry’s funny effusions, Leila managed to record the three jingles, though she had arrived in time to hear only the last one of them.
“Now we have a beginning.” She exhibited open satisfaction of the penciled copy of Jerry’s lively doggerel. She folded it twice and placed it in a pocket of her leather motor coat. “I shall expect you to take down and save me all future jingles of Jeremiah, Beauty, since you are the inspiration. Never fail to do so. Now you may talk to me about anything. I am so gracious.”
“I have copies of two jingles that Jeremiah spouted last week on an occasion when I brought her four letters from the mail-box. I’ll mail you copies of them tomorrow. Where is Midget? I know she can’t be far away.”