“I can’t help it, Jimmie.  It’s because I never knew a fellow had what’s he’s cut out for written all over him so.  You’re a born clerk, Jimmie.

“Sure, I’m a slick clerk, but—­”

“You’re born to be a clerk, a good clerk, even a two-hundred-a-month clerk, the way you can win the trade, but never your own boss.  I know what I’m talking about.  I know your measure better than any human on earth can ever know your measure.  I know things about you that you don’t even know yourself.”

“I never set myself up to nobody for anything I wasn’t.”

“Maybe not, Jimmie, but I know about you and—­and that Central Street gang that time, and—­”

“You!”

“Yes, honey, and there’s not another human living but me knows how little it was your fault.  Just bad company, that was all.  That’s how much I—­I love you, Jimmie, enough to understand that.  Why, if I thought May Scully and a set-up in business was the thing for you, Jimmie, I’d say to her, I’d say, if it was like taking my own heart out in my hand and squashing it, I’d say to her, I’d say, ‘Take him, May.’  That’s how I—­I love you, Jimmie.  Oh, ain’t it nothing, honey, a girl can come here and lay herself this low to you—­”

“Well, haven’t I just said you—­you deserve better.”

“I don’t want better, Jimmie.  I want you.  I want to take hold of your life and finish the job of making it the kind we can both be proud of.  Us two, Jimmie, in—­in our own decent two-by-four.  Shopping on Saturday nights.  Frying in our own frying-pan in our own kitchen.  Listening to our own phonograph in our own parlor.  Geraniums and—­and kids—­and—­and things.  Gas-logs.  Stationary washtubs.  Jimmie!  Jimmie!”

Mr. James P. Batch reached up for his hat and overcoat, cramming the newspaper into a rear pocket.

“Come on,” he said, stalking toward the side door and not waiting to see her to her feet.

Outside, a banner of stars was over the narrow street.  For a chain of five blocks he walked, with a silence and speed that Miss Slayback could only match with a running quickstep.  But she was not out of breath.  Her head was up, and her hand, where it hooked into Mr. Batch’s elbow, was in a vise that tightened with each block.

You who will mete out no other approval than that vouched for by the stamp of time and whose contempt for the contemporary is from behind the easy refuge of the classics, suffer you the shuddering analogy that between Aspasia who inspired Pericles, Theodora who suggested the Justinian code, and Gertie Slayback who commandeered Jimmie Batch, is a sistership which rounds them, like a lasso thrown back into time, into one and the same petticoat dynasty behind the throne.

True, Gertie Slayback’s mise en scene was a two-room kitchenette apartment situated in the Bronx at a surveyor’s farthest point between two Subway stations, and her present state one of frequent red-faced forays down into a packing-case.  But there was that in her eyes which witchingly bespoke the conquered, but not the conqueror.  Hers was actually the titillating wonder of a bird which, captured, closes its wings, that surrender can be so sweet.