“I got to hand it you, Loo; when you walk down this street, you make every girl in town look warmed over.”

“Do you like it, Charley?  It’s that checked jacket I bought at Hamlin’s sale last year made over.”

“Say, it’s classy!  You look like all the money in the world, honey.”

“Huh, two yards of coat-lining, forty-four cents, and Ida Bell’s last year’s office-hat reblocked, sixty-five.”

“You’re the show-piece of the town, all right.  Come on; let’s pick up a crowd and muss-up Claxton Road a little.”

“I meant what I said, Charley.  After the cuttings-up of last night and the night before I’m quits.  Maybe Charley Cox can afford to get himself talked about because he’s Charley Cox, but a girl like me with a job to hold down, and the way ma and Ida Bell were sitting up in their nightgowns, green around the gills, when I got home last night—­nix!  I’m getting myself talked about, if you want to know it, running with—­your gang, Charley.”

“I’d like to see anybody let out so much as a grunt about you in front of me.  A fellow can’t do any more, honey, to show a girl where she stands with him than ask her to marry him—­now can he?  If I’d have had my way last night, I’d—­”

“You was drunk when you asked me, Charley.”

“You mean you got cold feet?”

“Thank God, I did!”

“I don’t blame you, girl.  You might do worse—­but not much.”

“That’s what you’d need for your finishing-touch, a girl like me dragging you down.”

“You mean pulling me up.”

“Yes, maybe, if you didn’t have a cent.”

“I’d have enough sense then to know better than to ask you, honey.  You ’ain’t got that fourteen-carat look in your eye for nothing.  You’re the kind that’s going to bring in a big fish, and I wish it to you.”

“Lots you know.”

“Come on; let me ride you around the block, then.”

“If—­if you like my company so much, can’t you just take a walk with me or come out and sit on our steps awhile?”

“Lord, girl, Flamm Avenue is hot enough to fry my soul to-night!”

“We can’t all have fathers that live in thirty-room houses out in Kingsmoreland Place.”

“Thank God for that!  I sneaked home this morning to change my clothes, and thought maybe I’d got into somebody’s mausoleum by mistake.”

“Was—­was your papa around, Charley?”

“In the library, shut up with old man Brookes.”

“Did he—­did he see the morning papers?  You know what he said last time, Charley, when the motor-cycle cop chased you down an embankment.”

“Honey, if my old man was to carry out every threat he utters, I’d be disinherited, murdered, hong-konged, shanghaied, and cremated every day in the year.”

“I got to go now, Charley.”

“Not let a fellow even spin you home?”

“You know I want to, Charley, but—­but it don’t do you any good, boy, being seen with me in that joy-wagon of yours.  It—­it don’t do you any good, Charley, ever—­ever being seen with me.”