“To hear you talk, you’d think I was about six.”

“I’m the only girl that’ll ever be willing to make a whip out of herself that’ll keep you going and won’t sting, honey.  I know you’re soft and lazy and selfish and—­”

“Don’t forget any.”

“And I know you’re my good-looking good-for-nothing, and I know, too, that you—­you don’t care as much—­as much for me from head to toe as I do for your little finger.  But I—­I like you just the same, Jimmie.  That—­that’s what I mean about having no shame.  I—­do like you so—­so terribly, Jimmie.”

“Aw now—­Gert!”

“I know it, Jimmie—­that I ought to be ashamed.  Don’t think I haven’t cried myself to sleep with it whole nights in succession.”

“Aw now—­Gert!”

“Don’t think I don’t know it, that I’m laying myself before you pretty common.  I know it’s common for a girl to—­to come to a fellow like this, but—­but I haven’t got any shame about it—­I haven’t got anything, Jimmie, except fight for—­for what’s eating me.  And the way things are between us now is eating me.”

“I—­Why, I got a mighty high regard for you, Gert.”

“There’s a time in a girl’s life, Jimmie, when she’s been starved like I have for something of her own all her days; there’s times, no matter how she’s held in, that all of a sudden comes a minute when she busts out.”

“I understand, Gert, but—­”

“For two years and eight months, Jimmie, life has got to be worth while living to me because I could see the day, even if we—­you—­never talked about it, when you would be made over from a flip kid to—­to the kind of a fellow would want to settle down to making a little—­two-by-four home for us.  A—­little two-by-four all our own, with you steady on the job and advanced maybe to forty or fifty a week and—­”

“For God’s sake, Gertie, this ain’t the time or the place to—­”

“Oh yes, it is!  It’s got to be, because it’s the first time in four weeks that you didn’t see me coming first.”

“But not now, Gert.  I—­”

“I’m not ashamed to tell you, Jimmie Batch, that I’ve been the making of you since that night you threw the wink at me.  And—­and it hurts, this does.  God! how it hurts!”

He was pleating the table-cloth, swallowing as if his throat had constricted, and still rearing his head this way and that in the tight collar.

“I—­never claimed not to be a bad egg.  This ain’t the time and the place for rehashing, that’s all.  Sure you been a friend to me.  I don’t say you haven’t.  Only I can’t be bossed by a girl like you.  I don’t say May Scully’s any better than she ought to be.  Only that’s my business.  You hear? my business.  I got to have life and see a darn sight more future for myself than selling shirts in a Fourteenth Street department store.”

“May Scully can’t give it to you—­her and her fast crowd.”

“Maybe she can and maybe she can’t.”