"A hodd year, miss—comes just in so often, miss, due to come next year, halso. When the leap year comes, miss, then the ladies do the popping—they harsks the 'appy question, miss."
"O-h-h-! Thas very nize. I wish it are leap year now," said Sunny wistfully.
"Hit'll come, miss. Hit's on hit's way. A few months and then the ladies' day will dawn," and Hatton, moving about with cheer, clucked at the thought.
CHAPTER XI
A week after Bobs proposed to Sunny, Jinx, shining like the rising sun by an especially careful grooming administered by his valet, a flower adorning his lapel, and a silk hat topping his head, with a box of chocolates large enough to hold an Easter bonnet in his hand, and a smaller box of another kind in his vest pocket, presented himself at Jerry Hammond's studio. Flowers preceded and followed this last of Sunny's ardent suitors.
He was received by a young person arrayed in a pink pongee smock, sleeves rolled up, revealing a pair of dimpled arms, hair in distracting disorder, and a little nose on which seductively perched a blotch of flour, which the infatuated Jinx was requested to waft away with his silken handkerchief.
Sunny's cheeks were flushed from close proximity to that gas stove, and her eyes were bright with the warfare which she waged incessantly upon the aforesaid honourable stove. In the early days of her appearance at the studio—by the way, she had been domiciled there a whole month—Sunny's operations at the gas stove had had disastrous results. Her attempt to boil water by the simple device of turning on the gas, as she did the electric light was alarming in its odorous effects, but her efforts to blow out the oven was almost calamitous, and caused no end of excitement, for it singed her hair and eyebrows and scorched an arm that required the persistent and solicitous attention of her four friends, a doctor and the thoroughly agitated Hatton, on whose head poured the full vials of Jerry's wrath and blame. In fact, this accident almost drove Hatton to desert what he explained to Sunny was the "water wagon."
After that Sunny was strictly ordered by Jerry to keep out of the kitchen. Realising, however, that she could not be trusted on that score, he took half a day off from the office, and gave her a full course of instruction in the mysteries and works of said gas stove. It should be assumed therefore that by this time Sunny should have acquired at least a primary knowledge of the stove. Not so, however. She never lit the oven but she threw salt about to propitiate the oni (goblin) which she was sure had its home somewhere in that strange fire, and she hesitated to touch any of the levers once the fire was lit.