“A girl’s gotta have something!  You knew me before I was married, Jimmie, and there never was a girl more full of life.”

“Sure I knew you.  But you was a little cold-storage queen and turned me down.”

“He—­Harry, he never asks me nothing when I come in, and the kid’s asleep, anyways.”

“Color up there a little, Doll.  Where I’m going to take you there ain’t nothing but live ones.  I’m going to take you to a place where the color scheme of your greenbacks has got to be yellow.  Color up there, Doll.  You ain’t going dead, are you?”

She stretched open her eyes to wide, laughing pools, plowed through the rear-counter debris of pasteboard boxes and tissue-paper, reached for her jacket and tan, boyish hat.  A blowy, corn-colored curl caught like a tendril and curled round the brim.

“Going dead!  Say, my middle name is Speed!  It’s like Harry used to tell me when we wasn’t no farther along in the marriage game than his sneaking over here from the gents’ furnishing three times a day to price bill-folders—­he used to say that I was a live wire before Franklin flew his kite.”

“Doll!”

“I ain’t tired, Jimmie.  Not countin’ the year and a half I was home before Harry took sick, I been through the Christmas hell just six times.  The seventh don’t mean nothing in my life.  I’ve seen ’em behind these very counters cursing Christmas with tears in their eyes and spending their merry holiday in bed trying to get some of the soreness out.  It takes more than one Christmas to put me out of business.”

“Here, lemme tuck that curl in for you, Doll.”

“Quit!”

“Doll!”

“Quit, I say!”

“Color up there, girlie.  Look live!”

She rubbed her palms briskly across her cheeks to generate a glow, and they warmed to color as peaches blush to the kiss of the sun.

“See!”

“Pink as cherries!”

“That’s right, kid me along.”

“Tried to dodge me to-night, didn’t you, kitten?”

“I—­I didn’t think I ought to go to-night.”

“It’s a good thing my feelings ain’t hurt easy.”

“Honest, Jimmie, I didn’t try to dodge you.  I—­I only thought, with the girls here gabbling so much about last Tuesday night and all, it wouldn’t look right.  And he had a spell last night again, and the doctor said we—­we ought to get him South before the first snow—­South, where the sun shines.  But he’s got as much chance of gettin’ South as I have of climbing the South Pole!”

“A pretty little thing like you climbing the South Pole!  I’d be there with field-glasses all-righty!”

“I—­I went up and talked and begged and begged and talked to old Ingram up at the Aid Society to-day, but the old skinflint says they can’t do nothing for an employee after he’s been out of his department more’n eight weeks, and—­and Harry’s been out twelve.  He says the Society can’t do nothing no more, much less send him South.  Just like a machine he talked.  I could have killed him!”