Gilfoyle wrote her poems, too, real poems not meant for publication at advertising rates. Kedzie had never had anybody commit poetry at her before. It lifted her like that Biltmore elevator and sent her heart up into her head. He lauded Kedzie's pout as well as her more saltant expressions. He voiced a belief that life in a little hut with her would be luxury beyond the contemptible stupidities of life in a palace with another. Kedzie did not care for the hut detail, but the idolatry of so “brainy” a man was inspiring.
Kedzie and Gilfoyle were mutually afraid: she of his intellect, he of her beauty and of her very fragility. Of course, he called her by her new name, “Miss Adair.” Later he implored the priceless joy of calling her by her first name.
Gilfoyle feared to ask this privilege in prose, and so he put it in verse. Kedzie found it in her mail at the stage door. She huddled in a corner of the big undressing-room where the nymphs prepared for their task. The young rowdies kept peeking over her shoulder and snatching at her letter, but when finally she read it aloud to them as a punishment and a triumph, they were stricken with awe. It ran thus:
Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you “Anita”?
Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.
Kedzie stumbled over this, because she had not yet eradicated the Western final “r” from her pronunciation. She thought Mr. Gilfoyle was awful swell because he dropped it naturally. But she read on, scrambling over some of the words the way a horse jumps a fence one rail too high.
You are so adorable
I find it deplorable,
Absurd and abnormal.
To cling to the formal
'Twere such a good omen
To drop the cognomen.
So I beg you to promise
That you'll call me “Thomas,”
Or better yet, “Tommie,”
Instead of th' abomi-
Nable “Mr. Gilfoyle.”
You can, and you will foil
My torments Mephistian
By using my Christian
Name and permitting Yours Truly
To call you yours too-ly.
Miss Adair,
Hear my prayer
Do I dare
Call my love when I meet her
“Anita”? Anita! Anita!!
In the silence that followed she whisked out a box of shrimp-pink letter-paper she had bought at a drugstore. It was daintily ruled in violet lines and had a mauve “A” at the top. It was called “The Nobby Note,” and so she knew that it was all right.
She wrote on it the simple but thrilling answer:
DEAR TOMMIE,—You bet your boots!