“The silly!  Honest, ain’t he the silly?  He said he was going to play that for me the first thing this morning.  We dance it so swell together and all.  Aw, I thought he’d forget.  Ain’t he the silly—­remembering me?”

The red flowed persistently higher.

“Silly ain’t no name for him, with his square, Charley-boy face and polished hair; and—­”

“You let him alone, Hattie Krakow!  What’s it to you if—­”

“Nothing—­except I always say October is my unlucky month, because it was just a year ago that they moved him and the sheet music down to the basement.  Honest, I’m going to buy me a pair of earmuffs!  I’d hate to tell you how unpopular popular music is with me.”

“Huh!  You couldn’t play on a side-comb, much less play on the piano like Charley does.  If I didn’t have no more brains than some people—­honest, I’d go out and kill a calf for some!”

“You oughtta talk!  A girl that ’ain’t got no more brains than to gad round every night and every Sunday in foul-smelling, low-ceilinged dance-halls, and wear paper-soled slippers when she oughtta be wearing galoshes, and cheese-cloth waists that ain’t even decent, instead of wool undershirts!  You oughtta talk about brains—­you and Charley Chubb!”

“Yes, I oughtta talk!  If you don’t like my doings, Hattie Krakow, there ain’t no law says we gotta room together.  I been shifting for myself ever since I was cash-girl down at Tracy’s, and I ain’t going to begin being bossed now.  If you don’t like my keeping steady with Charley Chubb—­if you don’t like his sheet-music playing—­you gotta lump it!  I’m a good girl, I am; and if you got anything to in-sinuate; if—­”

“Sara Juke, ain’t you ashamed!”

“I’m a good girl, I am; and there ain’t nobody can cast a reflection on—­on—­”

Tears trembled in her voice, and she coughed from the deep recesses of her chest, and turned her head away, so that her profile was quivering and her throat swelling with sobs.

“I—­I’m a good girl, I am.”

“Aw, Sara, don’t I know it?  Ain’t that just where the rub comes?  Don’t I know it?  If you wasn’t a good girl would I be caring?”

“I’m a good girl, I am!”

“It’s your health, Sara, I’m kicking about.  You’re getting as pale and skinny as a goop; and for a month already you’ve been coughing, and never a single evening home to stick your feet in hot water and a mustard plaster on your chest.”

“Didn’t I take the iron tonic and spoil my teeth?”

“My sister Lizzie—­that’s the way she started, Sara; right down here in this basement.  There never was a prettier little queen down here.  Ask any of the old girls.  Like you in looks and all; full of vim, too.  That’s the way she started, Sara.  She wouldn’t get out in the country on Sundays or get any air in her lungs walking with me evenings.  She was all for dance-halls, too, Sara.  She—­she—­’Ain’t I told you about her over and over again?  ’Ain’t I?”