Nevertheless, Jim had asked him to see Sally Sales. When he wrote the letter, all sorts of hesitations and trepidations emerged from his past. He seemed to be Jim’s age or younger when he wrote it. In the first place he did not know whether to call her “Sally” or “Miss Sales,” and there was no book of usage to help him. Dear Sally [he wrote]: I hope you’ll excuse my calling you by your first name, but I think of you that way because Jim has told me so much about you. Then he threw the letter away. He seemed to be building himself up into a character in a Barrie play, or worse still, becoming like the hero of a drama in which Ruth Chatterton once starred. He could almost hear Sally Sales saying, “Oh, I’m going to call you ‘Daddy Long-Legs.’” The trouble was, he did not know what Sally Sales was like; all he could do was to picture her from his limited experience with girls he had known in his youth, or from the works of Scott Fitzgerald, from a few short stories in the Saturday Evening Post, and from his observation of his daughter Gwen who was younger.
