“I told him to-night, Kittie, he’s killin’ me with his deadness.  I ran out of the house from it.  It’s killin’ me.”

“Why, you poor simp, standing for it!”

“That’s what I come over for, Kit.  I can’t stand no more.  If I don’t talk to some one, I’ll bust.  There’s no one in this town I can open up to.  Him so sober—­and deacon.  They don’t know what it is to sit night after night dyin’ from his stillness.  Whole meals, Kit, when he don’t open his mouth except, ‘Hand me this; hand me that’—­and his beard movin’ up and down so when he chews.  Because a man don’t hit you and gives you spending-money enough for the little things don’t mean he can’t abuse you with—­with just gettin’ on your nerves so terrible.  I’m feelin’ myself slip—­crazy—­ever since I got back from Cincinnati and seen what’s goin’ on in the big towns and me buried here; I been feelin’ myself slip—­slip, Kittie.”

“Cincinnati!  Good Lord! if you call that life!  Any Monday morning on Forty-second Street makes Cincinnati look like New-Year’s Eve.  If you call Cincinnati life!”

“He’s small, Kittie.  He’s a small potato of a man in his way of livin’.  He can live and die without doin’ anything except the same things over and over again, year out and year in.”

“I know.  I know.  Ed was off the same pattern.  It’s the Adalia brand.  Lord!  Hanna Long, if you could see some of the fellows I got this minute paying attentions to me in New York, you’d lose your mind.  Spenders!  Them New York guys make big and spend big, and they’re willing to part with the spondoolaks.  That’s the life!”

“I—­You look it, Kit.  I never seen a girl get back her looks and keep ’em like you.  I says to him to-night, I says, ’When I look at myself in the glass, I wanna die.’”

“You’re all there yet, Hanna.  Your voice over here the other night was something immense.  Big enough to cut into any restaurant crowd, and that’s what counts in cabaret.  I don’t tell anybody how to run his life, but if I had your looks and your contralto, I’d turn ’em into money, I would.  There’s forty dollars a week in you this minute.”

Mrs. Burkhardt’s head went up.  Her mouth had fallen open, her eyes brightening as they widened.

“Kit—­when you goin’ back?”

“To-morrow a week, honey—­if I live through it.”

“Could—­you help me—­your little lawyer—­your—­”

“Remember, I ain’t advising—­”

“Could you, Kit, and to—­to get a start?”

“They say it of me there ain’t a string in the Bijou Cafe that I can’t pull my way.”

“Could you, Kit?  Would you?”

“I don’t tell nobody how to run his life, Hanna.  It’s mighty hard to advise the other fellow about his own business.  I don’t want it said in this town, that’s down on me, anyways, that Kit Scogin put ideas in Hanna Long’s head.”

“You didn’t, Kit.  They been there.  Once I answered an ad. to join a county fair.  I even sent money to a vaudeville agent in Cincinnati.  I—­”