“Some class to me, eh, kiddo?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”

He leaned closer.  His smile had an uplift like a crescent and a slight depression in his left cheek, too low for a dimple, twinkled when he smiled, like an adjacent star.

“Take it from me, Queenie, these glad rags are my stock in trade.  In my line I got to sport them.  At home I’m all to the overalls.  If my boss was to see the old red wool smoking-jacket I wear around the house, he’d fire me for burlesquing the business.”

“Well, of all the nerve!  Let go my hand.”

“Didn’t know I had it, little one.”

“And say, you give back that kodak picture you swiped off me yesterday.  I don’t give my photographs out promiscuous.”

“That little snap-shot of you?  Nix, I will!  I took that home and hung it in a mother-of-pearl frame right over the parlor table.”

“Sure!  And above the family Bible, huh?  I had a fellow once tell me he was a bookmaker, and I was green enough then to beg him to take me out and let me see him make ’em.  But I’ve learnt a thing or two about you and your kind since then, Charley-boy.”

“You come out to-night and I’ll show it to you myself.”

“Haven’t you got my number, yet, Cholly—­haven’t you?”

“What is it, little one, number scared-cat?”

She flung him a glance over the hump of one shoulder.  Nineteen summers had breezed lightly over her, and her lips were cherry-like, but tilted slightly as if their fruit had been plucked from the tree of sophistication.

“You bet your life I’m scared.”

“Why, out there in Glendale, little one, you won’t meet your own shadow, if that’s what’s hurting you.”

“You bet your life I won’t.”

“My old woman will fix you up all right.”

“Oh no, she won’t!”

“Aw, come on, kiddo.  We’re going to have a tree for the little brother, and the old woman will be rigged up like a mast in her spotted silk.  Come on.  Who’ll be any the wiser?”

Laughter and mockery rose to the surface of her eyes, bubbled to her lips.

“Huh!  What’s that only-son stuff you gave me yesterday?  All about how you had to land a job in the city and make good after your old man died, eh?  How about your yesterday’s line of talk?”

“I—­”

“All about how mother’s wandering boy found himself all plastered over with the mortgage and worked nights to get out from under.  All about—­Aw, say, what’s the use?  But I always say to you fellows, ’Boys, cultivate good memories; you need ’em.’  Little brother!  Ha, joke!”

“I—­aw—­I—­Little brother’s what we call my sister Till’s little red-headed kid.  Aw, what—­what you want to put me in bad for, sister?  I’m not so easy to trip up as you think I am.”

“Little brother!  And say, that’s a bottle of malted milk there in your pocket that you’re taking out to him, ain’t it?  Sure it is.”