Page:Temple Bailey--The Gay cockade.djvu/26

 and the top of Duncan's head was a shining cone. And the one interesting thing in our otherwise dreary days was Jimmie.

"You're such darling old dears," was his pleasant way of putting it.

But Duncan dug up the truth for me. "We knew him before he wrote. He gets back to that when he is with us."

I had grown to hate Elise. It was not a pleasant emotion, and I am not sure that she really deserved it. But Duncan hated her, too. "You're right," he said one day when we had lunched with Jimmie; "she's sucked him dry." Jimmie had been unusually silent. He had laughed little. He had tapped the table with his finger, and had kept his eyes on his finger. He had been absent-minded. "She has sucked him dry," said Duncan, with great heat.

But she hadn't. That was the surprising thing. Just as we were all giving up hope of Jimmie's proving himself something more than a hack, he did the great thing and the wonderful thing that years ago Elise had prophesied. His play, "The Gay Cockade," was accepted by a New York manager, and after the first night the world went wild about it.

I had helped Jimmie with the name. I had spoken once of youth as a gay cockade. "That's a 20