But all this while Peggy was interpolating wildly: "Do you play the mandolin? Do you play the mandolin?"
And now that the voice was pausing for her answer, her words came clear and distinct, "Do you play the mandolin?"
"Do you play the mandolin?" monotonously.
"Why, why--how funny your first remarks always are. Yesterday in the storm when I nearly ran you down you cried out 'Friday'--it didn't seem to have a bit of sense to it,--and now right while I'm trying to tell you something you ask me in a parlor conversational tone if I--if I----"
"Well, _do_ you?" she insisted desperately.
"Oh, goody, goody, then you're the one!" "What one?" mightily puzzled--and a trifle impatient.
"I can't tell you yet--I don't even know your name."
"Why, of course, I want you to know my name, that was partly why I called up," in an injured voice. "It's Jim Smith."
"Only that?" her disappointment was keen.
"James H. Smith, if you must have it all," somewhat surlily.
"O--oh," there went singing across the wires the breath of Peggy's rapture. "Isn't that lovely."
"No one ever thought it was particularly so before," the young man answered. "I'm glad you like it. Now, what is all of your name?"
"Peggy is the part you don't already know," she confessed, "and I like it better than the last part."
"I do, too," he chimed in heartily, "I won't need to say the last part at all any more, will I?"
"N-no," Peggy laughed. "Considering who you are. Only of course you don't know yet, do you?"
"Don't know who I am? Well, now, I always had a faint suspicion every time I looked in the glass that I was myself."
"I've said everything wrong," apologized Peggy sadly. "But you'll understand after I've seen you sometime again and told you about everything."
"Anything you say is all right with me, anyway," the voice answered quickly. "I wouldn't have you think for a minute that it wasn't. After the game way you almost went through death by paralysis--"
Here they both laughed, until the wires sang again and again.
"May I come over to-morrow afternoon and--meet the ogre and get her approval of me, and all that?" the man's voice asked at length.
"Yes, and you can meet somebody nicer than the ogre, too," generously promised Peggy, "my dearest-in-the-world room-mate, Katherine Foster. Oh, she is the splendidest girl! And the prettiest! And the smartest, too."