"She doesn't give 'em a chance, Cora; mark my word! The trouble is, she's too good for most she sees. They ain't up to her." "I can't understand it, Mrs. Schump. I always say there ain't a finer girl on the floor than Stella. When I see other girls, most of 'em fresh little rag-timers that ain't worth powder and shot, bringing down the finest kind of fellows, and Stella never asked out or nothing, I always say to myself, 'I can't understand it.' Take me--what Arch Sensenbrenner ever seen in me, with Stella and her complexion working in the same department--" "You got a way, Cora. There's just something about me don't take with the boys. Honest, if I could only see one of you girls alone with a fellow once, to see how you do it!" "Just listen to her, Mrs. Schump, with her eyes and complexion and all!" "There's not a reason my girl shouldn't have it as good and better than the best of them. She's a good girl, Cora. Stella's a good girl to me." "Aw, mamma--" "Don't I know it, Mrs. Schump! I always say if ever a girl would make some nice-earning, steady fellow a good wife, it's--" '"Good wife'! That ain't the name! Why, Cora, for ten years that child has lifted me on my bad days and carried me and babied me like I was a queen. It's nothing for her to rub me two hours straight. Not a day before she leaves for work that she don't come to me and--" "Fellows don't care about that kind of thing. A girl's got to have pep and something besides complexion and elbow-grease. I'm too fat." "She's always sayin' she's too fat. With one pound off, would she look as good, Cora? If I hadn't been as plump as a partridge in my girl-days--and if I do say it myself, I was as fine a lookin' girl as my Stella--do you think Dave Schump would have had eyes for me? Not if I was ten times the woman I was for him." "Sure she ain't too fat, Mrs. Schump. I always tell her it's her imagination. I know a girl bigger than she is that's keeping company with an expert piano-tuner. Why, I know girls twice her size. Stella's got a right good figure, she has." "Lots of good it does me! I--It's just like my brains to go right to my hands, once you put me with a fellow. That time your brother Ed called for me for that party at your house--honest, I couldn't open my mouth to him." "Can't understand it! 'Honest,' I says to Ed that time after the party, I says to him, 'Ed, why don't you go over and call on Stella Schump and take her to a movie or something? She's my idea of a girl, Stella is.' Think I could budge him? 'Naw,' was all I could get out of him. Just, 'Naw.' Honest, I could have shook him. But did he run down to that little flirt of a Gert Cobb's the very same night? He did. Honest, like I said to Arch, it makes me sick. Is it any wonder the world is filled with little flips like Gert Cobb, the way the fellows fall for 'em?"