After a violent effort to reach the space between her shoulder blades, she was compelled to appeal to her new master to act as her new maid.
"Oh, Mr. Lathrop," she stammered—"Ira," she corrected, "won't you please hook me up?" she pleaded.
Ira beamed with a second childhood boyishness: "I'll do my best, my little ootsum-tootsums, it's the first time I ever tried it."
"Oh, I'm so glad," Anne sighed, "it's the first time I ever was hooked up by a gentleman."
He gurgled with joy and, forgetting the poverty of space, tried to reach her lips to kiss her. He almost broke her neck and bumped his head so hard that instead of saying, as he intended, "My darling," he said, "Oh, hell!"
"Ira!" she gasped. But he, with all the proprietorship he had assumed, answered cheerily: "You'll have to get used to it, ducky darling. I could never learn not to swear." He proved the fact again and again by the remarks he addressed to certain refractory hooks. He apologized, but she felt more like apologizing for herself.
"Oh, Ira," she said, "I'm so ashamed to have you see me like this—the first morning."
"Well, you haven't got anything on me—I'm not shaved."
"You don't have to tell me that," she said, rubbing her smarting cheek. Then she bumped her head and gasped: "Oh—what you said."
This made them feel so much at home that she attained the heights of frankness and honesty by reaching in her handbag for a knob of supplementary hair, which she affixed dextrously to what was homegrown. Ira, instead of looking shocked, loved her for her honesty, and grinned: