“I liked you myself, Doll, but you fell for a pair of shoulders over in the gents’ furnishing that wasn’t wide from nothing but padding.  I could have told you there was all cotton batting and no lungs there.  I could have told you.”

“Jimmie, ain’t you ashamed!  Jimmie!”

“Aw, I was just kidding.  But you ain’t real on that true-blue stuff, Doll.  I can look into your eyes and see you’re bustin’ to lemme blow you.  That’s what you get, sweetness, when you don’t ask your Uncle Fuller first.  If you’d have asked me I could have told you he was weak in the chest when you married him.  I could have told you that you’d be back here two years later selling leatherette vanity-cases and supportin’ a—­”

“You!  Jimmie Fitzgibbons, you—­”

“Gad, Doll, go to it!  When you color up like that you look like a rose—­a whole bouquet of them.”

“You—­you don’t know nothing about him.  He—­he never knew he had a lung till a month after the kid came, and they moved the gents’ furnishing over by the Broadway door where the draught caught him.”

“Sure, he didn’t, Doll; no harm meant.  That’s right, stand by him.  I like to see it.  Why, a little queen across the counter from you tole me you’d have married him if he’d had three bum lungs, that crazy you was!”

“Like fun!  If me or him had dreamt he wasn’t sound we—­I wouldn’t be in this mess, I—­we—­I wouldn’t!”

Her little face was pale as a spray of jessamine against a dark background, and, try as she would to check them, tears sprang hot to her eyes, dew trembled on her lashes.

“Poor little filly!”

More tears rushed to her eyes, as if he had touched the wellsprings of her self-compassion.  “You gotta excuse me, Jimmie.  I ain’t cryin’, only I’m dog tired from nursin’ and drudgin’, drudgin’ and nursin’.”

“Hard luck, little un!”

“Him layin’ there and me tryin’ to—­to make things meet.  You gotta excuse me, Jimmie, I’m done up.”

“That’s why I wanna blow you, sweetness.  I can’t bear to see a little filly like you runnin’ with the odds dead agin her.”

“You been swell to me, Jimmie.”

“The sky’s my limit, Doll.”

“Maybe it wasn’t right for me to go with you last Tuesday night, him layin’ there, and the kid and all, but a girl’s gotta have something, don’t she, Jimmie?  A girl that’s got on her shoulders what I got has gotta have something—­a laugh now and then!”

“That’s the goods, Doll.  A little filly like you has got to.”

“Honest, the way I laughed when you stuck them hothouse grapes on my hat for trimming the other night, just like they didn’t cost nothing—­honest, the way I laughed gimme enough strength for a whole night’s nursin’.  Honest, I felt like in the old days before—­before I was married.”

“Gad! if you had treated me white in them days, Doll—­if you hadn’t pulled that saint stuff on me and treated me cold storage—­there ain’t nothing I wouldn’t have done for you.”