“God! sometimes I wake up in the night just like him and ma was still alive and me and her was sitting there listening to him creak up the stairs on his bad nights.  I wake up, I can tell you, in a sweat—­right in a sweat.”

“I knew you in them days, kiddo, just like you knew me.  That’s why you can’t pull nothing over on a fellow, kiddo, that’s had as many pulls on your all-day suckers as I have.  You’re a little quitter, you are, and sometimes I think you’re out for bigger game.”

“It don’t mean because a girl was born in the mud she’s got to stick there, does it?”

“No, but she can’t pretend she don’t know one of the old mud-turtles when she sees one.”

“Mud-turtle is the right name.”

“The crowd has got your number, all right, kiddo; they know you’re out after bigger game.  You’re a little turncoat, that’s what they say about you.”

“Turncoat!  Who wouldn’t turn a coat they was ashamed of?  I guess you all don’t remember how I used to say, even back in those years when I was taking tickets down at Lute’s old Fourteenth Street Amusement Parlors, how when my little minute came I was going to breeze away from the gang down there?”

“I remember, all righty.”

“How I was going to get me a job up-town here, where I could get in with a decent crowd of girls, and not be known for the kind down there that you and all of ’em knew I—­I wasn’t.”

“Sure we knew.”

“Yes, but what good does that do me?  Can a dirty little yellow-haired snip over in the Fancy Fruits give me the once-over and a turn-down?  She can.  And why?  Because I ain’t certified.  I come from a counterfeit crowd, and who’s going to take the trouble to find my number and see if it’s real?”

“Aw, now—­”

“Didn’t a broken-down old granny over in the Thirty-fourth Street house where I roomed give me notice last week, because Addie Lynch found me out one night and came to see me, lit up like a Christmas tree?”

“That’s why I say, Marj, stick to the old ones who know you.”

“Like May Pope used to say, a girl might as well have the game as the name.”

“If I was a free man, Marj, I’d—­”

“Where has the strait and narrow got me to, I’d like to know?  Sometimes I think it’s nothing but a blind alley pushing me back.”

“If I was a free man, Marj—­”

“Let me meet a slick little up-stage fellow that doesn’t have to look two ways before he walks the wrong beat in daylight; let me meet a fellow like that, and where does it get me?”

“I’m no saint, Marj, but there ain’t a beat in town I’d have to look two ways on.  Ask any cop—­”

“Does the slick little up-stage fellow get my number?  He does not.  I’d like to see one of them ask that dirty little yellow-head over in the Fancy Fruits to go home with him.  A little Nobody-Home like her, just because she was raised in an amen corner of the Bronx and has a six-foot master-mechanic brother to call for her every time she works fifteen minutes later, she can wear her hands crossed on her chest and a lily stuck in ’em and get away with it, too.”