Page:Our Little Girl (1923).pdf/49

 “There must have been half a dozen reporters there before they let me at her,” Tommy related, “and as the one ahead of me—a famous sob sister—came out, I could see a tiger draped over a couch. It was planted of course. You know what ‘planted’ means ?”

Dorothy thought that it meant placed there for a purpose. She was finding Tommy’s technical jargon simpler to comprehend.

“Exactly,” continued Tommy, who immediately raised Dorothy’s intelligence rating several points. “I figured that she’d put it there to make the reporters ask questions. I knew she wanted to get over the idea that she was the soul of a tiger or something like that. And sure enough—the first thing she did was to ask me to sit on the tiger skin with her.”

Dorothy smiled and drew back a bit.

“Oh, I don’t suppose she had any romantic purpose in mind,” Tommy went on. “I don’t think I appeal to women that way.”

He stopped to light a cigarette. Dorothy had no comment to make on his alleged lack of appeal to women “that way,” and he continued with a little less enthusiasm:

“She asked me if I minded if she held my hand while I interviewed her. She said it created a bond of sympathy between the interviewer and herself. I couldn’t very well refuse, although I’m not generally asked to hold hands. Not by people I interview, anyhow.”

He shifted some ashes to a tray.

“Took in my eyes,’ she said, and I did. What else could I do? ‘Now ask me anything!’ she said. Of course, she expected me to ask her what she thought of New York or American women or something like that, but I threw her out of her routine. I asked her whether