"Please call me Marcia."
"May I?" He was again eager and boyish.
"Why not?" I said. He went on with his unfinished sentence.
"—And I pride myself that I rose to the occasion of mother's command to make it 'brief but explicit'."
"Poor girl, you 've had little chance to hear anything explicit from me as yet." Mrs. Macleod smiled, rather sadly I thought. "But you shall know before you go to bed. I could n't be so thoughtless as to keep you in suspense over night."
"Oh, I can wait," I said; "but what I want to know, Mr. Macleod—"
"Please call me Jamie," he said, imitating my voice and intonation.
"May I?" I replied, mimicking his own. Then we both fell to laughing like two children, and it seemed to me that I felt what it is to be young, for the first time in my life. The four dogs wagged their tails, threshing the floor with them like flails and keeping time to our hilarity; Mrs. Macleod smiled, almost happily, and Marie came in to see what it was all about.
"What do you want to know?" he said at last, mopping the tears from his eyes with his napkin.
"Why you advertised your mother as 'an elderly Scotchwoman'?"