“It’s a good thing we made up our minds quick, Jimmie.  They’ll be getting wise.  If too many get exemption from the army by marrying right away, it’ll be a give-away.”

“I’d like to know who can lay his hands on the exemption of a little wife to support.”

“Oh, Jimmie, it—­it sounds so funny.  Being supported!  Me that always did the supporting, not only to me, but to my mother and great-grand-mother up to the day they died.”

“I’m the greatest little supporter you ever seen.”

“Me getting up mornings to stay at home in my own darling little flat, and no basement or time-clock.  Nothing but a busy little hubby to eat him nice, smelly, bacon breakfast and grab him nice morning newspaper, kiss him wifie, and run downtown to support her.  Jimmie, every morning for your breakfast I’m going to fry—­”

“You bet your life he’s going to support her, and he’s going to pay back that forty dollars of his girl’s that went into his wedding duds, that hundred and ninety of his girl’s savings that went into furniture—­”

“We got to meet our instalments every month first, Jimmie.  That’s what we want—­no debts and every little darling piece of furniture paid up.”

“We—­I’m going to pay it, too.”

“And my Jimmie is going to work to get himself promoted and quit being a sorehead at his steady hours and all.”

“I know more about selling, honey, than the whole bunch of dubs in that store put together if they’d give me a chance to prove it.”

She laid her palm to his lips.

“’Shh-h-h!  You don’t nothing of the kind.  It’s not conceit, it’s work is going to get my boy his raise.”

“If they’d listen to me, that department would—­”

“’Shh-h!  J. G. Hoffheimer don’t have to get pointers from Jimmie Batch how to run his department store.”

“There you go again.  What’s J. G. Hoffheimer got that I ’ain’t?  Luck and a few dollars in his pocket that, if I had in mine, would—­

“It was his own grit put those dollars there, Jimmie.  Just put it out of your head that it’s luck makes a self-made man.”

“Self-made!  You mean things just broke right for him.  That’s two-thirds of this self-made business.”

“You mean he buckled right down to brass tacks, and that’s what my boy is going to do.”

“The trouble with this world is it takes money to make money.  Get your first few dollars, I always say, no matter how, and then when you’re on your feet scratch your conscience if it itches.  That’s why I said in the beginning, if we had took that hundred and ninety furniture money and staked it on—­”

“Jimmie, please—­please!  You wouldn’t want to take a girl’s savings of years and years to gamble on a sporty cigar proposition with a card-room in the rear.  You wouldn’t, Jimmie.  You ain’t that kind of fellow.  Tell me you wouldn’t, Jimmie.”

He turned away to dive down into the barrel.  “Naw,” he said, “I wouldn’t.”