much for me from head to toe as I
do for your little finger. But I--like you just the same, Jimmie.
That--that's what I mean about having no shame. I--do like you so--so
terribly, Jimmie."

"Aw now--Gert!"

"I know it, Jimmie--that I ought to be ashamed. Don't think I haven't
cried myself to sleep with it whole nights in succession."

"Aw now--Gert!"

"Don't think I don't know it, that I'm laying myself before you pretty
common. I know it's common for a girl to--to come to a fellow like this,
but--but I haven't got any shame about it--I haven't got anything,
Jimmie, except fight for--for what's eating me. And the way things are
between us now is eating me."

"I---- Why, I got a mighty high regard for you, Gert."

"There's a time in a girl's life, Jimmie, when she's been starved like I
have for something of her own all her days; there's times, no matter how
she's held in, that all of a sudden comes a minute when she busts out."

"I understand, Gert, but----"

"For two years and eight months, Jimmie, life has got to be worth while
living to me because I could see the day, even if we--you--never talked
about it, when you would be made over from a flip kid to--to the kind of
a fellow would want to settle down to making a little two-by-four home
for us. A little two-by-four all our own, with you steady on the job and
advanced maybe to forty or fifty a week and----"

"For God's sake, Gertie, this ain't the time or the place to----"

"Oh yes, it is! It's got to be, because it's the first time in four
weeks that you didn't see me coming first."

"But not now, Gert. I----"

"I'm not ashamed to tell you, Jimmie Batch, that I've been the making
of you since that night you threw the wink at me. And--and it hurts,
this does. God! how it hurts!"

He was pleating the table-cloth, swallowing as if his throat had
constricted, and still rearing his head this way and that in the tight
collar.

"I--never claimed not to be a bad egg. This ain't the time and the place
for rehashing, that's all. Sure you been a friend to me. I don't say you
haven't. Only I can't be bossed by a girl like you. I don't say May
Scully's any better than she ought to be. Only that's my business. You
hear? my business. I got to have life and see a darn sight more future
for myself than selling shirts in a Fourteenth Street department store."

"May Scully can't give it to you--her and her fast crowd."

"Maybe she can and maybe she can't."

"The