“I—­I just can’t get over it, Phonzie, you forty!  You five years older than me and me afraid—­thinking all along it was just the other way.”

“I had already shed my milk teeth before you were born, madam.”

“Whatta you know about that!”

“Ask Gert.  She’s been following me around from place to place for years, sticking to me because I say there ain’t a model in the business can show the clothes like she can.”

“Yes?”

“Ask her; she’s my age and we been on the job together for twenty years.  Long before live models was even known in the business, she and me were showing goods in the old Cunningham place on Madison Avenue.”

“Even—­even back there you was dead set on having good figures around the place, wasn’t you, Phonzie?”

“I tell you it’s economy in the end, madam, to have figures that can show off the goods to advantage.”

“Oh, I’m not kicking, Phonzie, but I was just saying.”

“I have been in the business long enough, madam, to learn that the greatest way in the world to show gowns is on live stock.  A dame will fall for any sort of a rag stuck on a figure like Gert’s, and think the waist-line and all is thrown in with the dress.  You seen for yourself Van Ness order five gowns right off Gert’s back to-day.  Would she have fallen for them if we had shown them in the hand?  Not much!  She forgot all about her own thirty-eight waist-line when she ordered that pink organdie.  She was seeing Gert’s twenty-two inches.”

“But honest, Phonzie, take a girl like Gert, even with her figure, she—­Oh, I don’t know, there’s something about her!”

“She may rub your fur the wrong way, madam, but under all her flip ways they don’t come no finer than Gert.”

“No, it ain’t that, only she don’t always get across.  Take Lipton; she won’t even let her show her a gown; she’s always calling for Dodo instead.  Sometimes I think the trade takes exceptions to a girl like Gert, her all decked out in diamonds that—­show how—­how fly she must be.”

“Gertie Dobriner’s the best in the business, just the same, madam.  She ain’t stuck on her way of living no more than I am, but she’s a model and she ’ain’t got enough of anything else in her to make the world treat her any different than a model.”

“I’m not saying she ain’t a good thirty-six, Phonzie.”

“I got to hand it to her, madam, when it comes to a lot of things.  She may be a little skylarker, but take it from me, it ain’t from choice, and when she likes you—­God! honest, I think that girl would pawn her soul for you.  When I was down with pneumonia—­”

“I ain’t saying a thing against her.”

“She’s no saint, maybe, but then God knows I’m not, either, and what I don’t know about her private life don’t bother me.”

“Oh, I—­I know you like her all right.”

“Say, I’ll bet you any amount if that girl had memory enough to learn the words of a song or the steps of a dance, she could have landed a first-row job in any musical show on Broadway.  She could do it now, for that matter.  Gad! did you see her to-day showing off that Queen Louise cloth-of-gold model?  Honest, she took my breath away, and I been on the floor with her twenty years.”