“Some biscuits!”

“Bad boy, stop jollying.”

“Say, if I’d tell you the truth about what I think of these biscuits, you’d say I was writing a streetcar advertisement for baking-powder.  Say, this is some cup custard!”

“More?”

“Full to my eyebrows.”

“Just a little bittsie?”

“Nope.”

He lighted a cigarette and they settled back in after-dinner completeness, their dessert-plates pushed well toward the center of the table and their senses quiet.  She pleated the edge of her napkin and watched him blow leisurely spirals of smoke to the ceiling.

“What you thinking about, Phonzie?”

“Nothing.”

“Honest?”

“If I was thinking at all I was just sizing it up as pretty soft for a fellow like me to get this sort of stand-in with—­with my boss.  Gawd! me and Roth used to love each other like snakes.”

“I—­I ain’t your boss, Phonzie.  Don’t I give you the run of everything—­hiring the models and all?”

“Sure you’re my boss, and it’s pretty soft for me.”

“And I was just thinking, Phonzie, that it’s pretty soft for me to have found a fellow like you to manage things for me.”

“Shucks!”

“Without you, so used to the ways of the Avenue and all that kind of thing, where would I be now, trying to run in the right kind of bluff with the trade?”

“That’s easy!  After all, Fifth Avenue and Third Avenue is pretty much alike in the end, madam.  A spade may be a spade, but if you’re a good salesman, you can put it on black velvet and sell it for a dessert-spoon any day in the week.”

“That’s just what I’m saying, Phonzie, about you’re knowing how.  I needed just a fellow like you to show me how the swell trade has got to be blindfolded, and that the difference between a dressmaker and a modiste is about a hundred and fifty dollars a gown.”

“You ought to see the way we handled them when I was on the floor for Roth.  Say, we wouldn’t touch a peignoir in that establishment for under two hundred and fifty, and—­we had ’em coming in there like sheep.  The Riverside Drive trade is nothing, madam, compared to what we could do down there with the Avenue business.”

“You sure know how to handle the lorgnette bunch, Phonzie.”

“Is it any wonder, being in the business twenty years?”

“Twenty years!  Why, Phonzie, you—­you don’t look much more than twenty yourself.”

He laughed, shifting one knee to the other.  “That’s because you can’t see that my eye teeth are gold, madam.”

“You’re so light on your feet, Phonzie, and slick.”

“To look twenty and feel your forty years ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.  If I had a home of my own, you know what I’d buy first—­a pair of carpet slippers and a patent rocker.”

“I bet you mean it, too, Phonzie.”

“Sure I mean it!  How’d you like to go through life like me, trying to keep the kink ironed in my hair and out of my back, or lose my job at the only kind of work I’m good for?  It’s like having to live with a grin frozen on your face so you can’t close your mouth.”