"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." "Them few dollars won't make you; they'll break you." "That's for her to decide, not you." "I'll tell her myself. I'll face her right here and----" "Now, look here, if you think I'm going to be let in for a holy show between you two girls, you got another think coming. One of us has got to clear out of here, and quick, too. You been talking about the side door; there it is. In five minutes I got a date in this place that I thought I could keep like any law-abiding citizen. One of us has got to clear, and quick, too. Gad! you wimmin make me sick, the whole lot of you!" "If anything makes you sick, I know what it is. It's dodging me to fly around all hours of the night with May Scully, the girl who put the tang in tango. It's eating around in swell sixty-cent restaurants like this and----" "Gad! your middle name ought to be Nagalene."