der
two hundred and fifty, and--we had 'em coming in there like sheep. The
Riverside Drive trade is nothing, madam, compared to what we could do
down there with the Avenue business."

"You sure know how to handle the lorgnette bunch, Phonzie."

"Is it any wonder, being in the business twenty years?"

"Twenty years! Why, Phonzie, you--you don't look much more than twenty
yourself."

He laughed, shifting one knee to the other. "That's because you can't
see that my eye teeth are gold, madam."

"You're so light on your feet, Phonzie, and slick."

"To look twenty and feel your forty years ain't what it's cracked up to
be. If I had a home of my own, you know what I'd buy first--a pair of
carpet slippers and a patent rocker."

"I bet you mean it, too, Phonzie."

"Sure I mean it! How'd you like to go through life like me, trying to
keep the kink ironed in my hair and out of my back, or lose my job at
the only kind of work I'm good for? It's like having to live with a grin
frozen on your face so you can't close your mouth."

"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 seein