“Y-yes.”

“Keep down your hips and waist-line, Gert, I always say to her, and you are good in the business for ten years yet.”

“She should worry while the crop of four carats is good.”

“Yes, but just the same a girl like her don’t know when her luck may turn.  A girl can lose her luck sometimes before she loses her figure.”

“Any old time she can lose her luck with you.”

“Me!”

“Yes, you!”

Madam Moores bent over the pleats in her napkin.  Opposite her, his cigarette held fastidiously aloft, he regarded her through its haze.

“Well, of all things!  So that—­that’s what you think?”

“I—­I know.”

“Know what?”

“That she’s dead strong for you.”

“Sure she is, but what’s that got to do with it?  That girl’s like—­well, she’s like a sister or—­or a pal to me, but she’s got about as much time for a fellow of my pace, except when she gets blue, as—­as the Queen of Sheba has.”

“That’s what you think, maybe, but everybody else knows she—­she’s been after you for years, trying—­”

“Aw, cut the comedy, madam.  Honest, you make me sore.  She’s nothing to me off the floor but a darn good pal.  Say, I can treat her to a sixty-cent table d’hote twice a week; but don’t you think in the back of my head, when it comes to a showdown, that I couldn’t even buy silk shoelaces for a girl of her kind.  I ain’t her pace and we both know it.  Bosh!”

“You’d like to be, all right, if—­if she didn’t have so many rich ones hanging around.”

“Just the same, many’s the time she’s told me if she could land a regular fellow and do the regular thing and settle down on seventy-five a month in a Harlem flat, why she’d drop all this skylarking of hers for a family of youngsters, so quick it would make your head swim.”

“Sure, that’s just what I say, she—­”

“Many’s the time she—­she’s cried to me—­just cried, because the kind of life she has to live don’t lead to anything, and she knows it.”

“I ain’t blaming you for liking her, Phonzie; a girl with her figure can make an old dub like me look like—­well, I just guess after her I—­I must look like thirty cents to you.”

“You!  Say, you got more real sense in your little finger than three of Gert’s kind put together.”

She colored like a wild rose.

“Sense ain’t what counts with the men nowadays; it’s looks and—­and speed like Gert’s.”

“Girls like Gert are all right, I tell you; but say, when it comes to real brains like yours—­nobody home.”

“Maybe not, but just the same it’s the girls with sense get tired having the men rave about their smartness and pass on, to go rushing after a empty head completely smothered under yellow curls.  That’s how much real brains counts for with—­with you men.”

He flung her a gesture, his cigarette trailing a design in smoke.  “Honest, madam, you got me wrong there.  A fellow like me ’ain’t got the nerve to—­to go after a woman like you.  A girl like Dodo or Gert is my size, but I’d be a swell dub trying to line up alongside of you, now wouldn’t I?”