“Them few dollars won’t make you; they’ll break you.”

“That’s for her to decide, not you.”

“I’ll tell her myself.  I’ll face her right here and—­”

“Now, look here, if you think I’m going to be let in for a holy show between you two girls, you got another think coming.  One of us has got to clear out of here, and quick, too.  You been talking about the side door; there it is.  In five minutes I got a date in this place that I thought I could keep like any law-abiding citizen.  One of us has got to clear, and quick, too.  God! you wimmin make me sick, the whole lot of you!”

“If anything makes you sick, I know what it is.  It’s dodging me to fly around all hours of the night with May Scully, the girl who put the tang in tango.  It’s eating around in swell sixty-cent restaurants like this and—­”

“Gad! your middle name ought to be Nagalene.”

“Aw, now, Jimmie, maybe it does sound like nagging, but it ain’t, honey.  It—­it’s only my—­my fear that I’m losing you, and—­and my hate for the every-day grind of things, and—­”

“I can’t help that, can I?”

“Why, there—­there’s nothing on God’s earth I hate, Jimmie, like I hate that Bargain-Basement.  When I think it’s down there in that manhole I’ve spent the best years of my life, I—­I wanna die.  The day I get out of it, the day I don’t have to punch that old time-clock down there next to the Complaints and Adjustment Desk, I—­I’ll never put my foot below sidewalk level again to the hour I die.  Not even if it was to take a walk in my own gold-mine.”

“It ain’t exactly a garden of roses down there.”

“Why, I hate it so terrible, Jimmie, that sometimes I wake up nights gritting my teeth with the smell of steam-pipes and the tramp of feet on the glass sidewalk up over me.  Oh.  God! you dunno—­you dunno!”

“When it comes to that the main floor ain’t exactly a maiden’s dream, or a fellow’s, for that matter.”

“With a man it’s different, It’s his job in life, earning, and—­and the woman making the two ends of it meet.  That’s why, Jimmie, these last two years and eight months, if not for what I was hoping for us, why—­why—­I—­why, on your twenty a week, Jimmie, there’s nobody could run a flat like I could.  Why, the days wouldn’t be long enough to putter in.  I—­Don’t throw away what I been building up for us, Jimmie, step by step!  Don’t, Jimmie!”

“Good Lord, girl!  You deserve better ’n me.”

“I know I got a big job, Jimmie, but I want to make a man out of you, temper, laziness, gambling, and all.  You got it in you to be something more than a tango lizard or a cigar-store bum, honey.  It’s only you ’ain’t got the stuff in you to stand up under a five-hundred-dollar windfall and—­a—­and a sporty girl.  If—­if two glasses of beer make you as silly as they do, Jimmie, why, five hundred dollars would land you under the table for life.”

“Aw-there you go again!”