It was a mighty good speech. It would be hard to find a serenade to beat it. And he read it superbly. He had sung it to every one of his only girls in the world, his eternal (pro tem.) passions. He had had about nineteen muses already.
Kedzie did not know this, of course. And it would not have mattered much. Better the nine-and-ninetieth muse to such a man than the first and final gas-stove slave of a Tommie Gilfoyle.
Kedzie sat in the state of nerves of a little girl alone on a mountain-top with lightning shimmering and striking all round her. She was so happy, so full of electrical sparks, that she was fairly incandescent. As she said afterward, she felt “all lit up.”
Ferriday spun out the plot of his new five-reel scenario until he was like an unreeled spider. He was all out. The mechanical details interested and refreshed him now. He must order the studio scenery and select the outdoor “locations.” He must pick the supporting cast and devise one or two blood-curdling moments of great peril.
Kedzie was too excited to note the ghoulish joy with which he planned to put her into the most perilous plights that had ever threatened even a movie star with death or crippledom.
“Do they scare you, my dear?” he asked.
“Scare me?” said Kedzie. “Why, Mr. Ferriday, if you told me to, I'd go out to the Bronx Zoo-ological Gardens and bite the ear off the biggest lion they got in the lion-house.”
Ferriday reached out, put his arm about her farther shoulder, and squeezed her to him after the manner of dosing an accordeon. Kedzie emitted the same kind of squeak. But she was not unhappy, and she did not even say, “Sir!”
The plot of The Kedziad was to be based on the From-Rags-to-Riches leitmotiv, Kedzie was to be a cruelly treated waif brought up as a boy by a demoniac Italian padrone who made her steal. She was to be sent into a rich man's home to rob it. She would find the rich man about to commit suicide all over his sumptuous library. She would save him, and he would save her from the padrone's revenge, on condition that she should dress as a girl (he had not, of course, suspected that she really was one at the time—had always been one, in fact). She would dress as a girl and conduct a very delicate diplomatic mission with a foreign ambassador, involving a submarine wrecked (in the studio tank) and a terrific ride across one of the deadliest battle-fields of Verdun (New Jersey) with a vast army of three hundred supers.
When Kedzie had saved two or three nations and kept the United States from war the millionaire would regret that she was, after all, only a boy and be overcome with rapture when she told him the truth. The three hundred supers would then serve as wedding-guests in the biggest church wedding ever pulled off.