"Huh!"--sniffling so that her thin nose quirked sidewise. "I will now indulge in hollow laughter--" "You can't, dearie," said Miss Hassiebrock, driven to vaudevillian extremities, "you're cracked." "Well, I may be cracked, but my good name ain't." A stiffening of Miss Hassiebrock took place, as if mere verbiage had suddenly flung a fang. From beneath the sternly and too starched white shirtwaist and the unwilted linen cravat wound high about her throat and sustained there with a rhinestone horseshoe, it was as if a wave of color had started deep down, rushing up under milky flesh into her hair. "Is that meant to be an in-sinuating remark, Josie?" "'Tain't how it's meant; it's how it's took." "There's some poor simps in this world, maybe right here in this store, ought to be excused from what they say because they don't know any better." "I know this much: To catch the North End street-car from here, I don't have to walk every night down past the Stag Hotel to do it." At that Miss Hassiebrock's ears, with the large pearl blobs in them, tingled where they peeped out from the scallops of yellow hair, and she swallowed with a forward movement as if her throat had constricted. "I--take the street-car where I darn please, and it's nobody's darn business." "Sure it ain't! Only, if a poor working-girl don't want to make it everybody's darn business, she can't run around with the fast rich boys of this town and then get invited to help hem the altar-cloth." "Anything I do in this town I'm not ashamed to do in broad daylight." "Maybe; but just the samey, I notice the joy rides out to Claxton don't take place in broad daylight. I notice that 'tall, striking blonde' and Charley Cox's speed-party in the morning paper wasn't exactly what you'd call a 'daylight' affair." "No, it wasn't; it was--my affair." "Say, if you think a girl like you can run with the black sheep of every rich family in town and make a noise like a million dollars with the horsy way she dresses, it ain't my grave you're digging." "Maybe if some of the girls in this store didn't have time to nose so much, they'd know why I can make them all look like they was caught out in the rain and not pressed the next morning. While they're snooping in what don't concern them I'm snipping. Snipping over my last year's black-and-white-checked jacket into this year's cutaway. If you girls had as much talent in your needle as you've got in your conversation, you might find yourselves somewheres." "Maybe what you call 'somewheres' is what lots of us would call 'nowheres.'" Miss Hassiebrock drew herself up and, from the suzerainty of sheer height, looked down upon Miss Beemis there, so brown and narrow beside the friendship-bracelet rack. "I'll have you know, Josie Beemis, that if every girl in this store watched her step like me, there'd be a darn sight less trouble in the world." "I know you don't go beyond the life-line, Loo, but, gee! you--you do swim out some!"