"You're one swell little guesser, you are _not_. You couldn't get inside a riddle with a can-opener. 'Cause you're stuck on me! Gee!" "Well, I am." "I didn't ask you why you was like a bottle of glue. I asked you why you was like a rubber band." "Aw, I give up, Miss Sadie." "'Cause you're so stretchy, see? 'Cause you're so stretchy you'll yawn your arm off if you don't watch it." Max Meltzer collapsed in an attitude of mock prostration against a stock-shelf. "Gee! that must have been cracked before the first nut." "Smarty!" Across the specially priced mill-ends she flashed the full line of her teeth, and with an intensity his features ill concealed he noted how sweet her throat as it arched. "It's the spring fever gets inside of me and makes me so stretchy, Miss Sadie. It's a good thing trade is slow down here in the basement to-day, because it's the same with me every year; the Saturday before spring-opening week I just get to feeling like all outdoors." "Wait till you see me with a new red-satin bow stuck on my last summer's shape. Dee Dee's got to lend me the price for two yards of three-inch red-satin ribbon for my spring opening." His breath rose in his throat. "I bet you look swell in red, Miss Sadie. But a girl like you looks swell in anything." "Red's my color. Dee Dee says my mamma was a gay one, too, when it came to color. Had to have a red bow pinned somewheres around all the months she was in bed and--and up to the very night she died. Gimme red every time. Dee Dee's the one that's always kicking against red; she says I got too flashy taste." "Say, if she keeps bossing and bossing at you, what do you keep on living with her for?" "Wouldn't you live with your own mother's sister if she raised you from a kid? What am I going to do, put her in cold storage, now that her eyes are going back on her? Up in the ribbons she can't hardly keep her colors graduated no more, that's how blind she's getting. Only yesterday a dame brought back some lavender ribbon and wiped up the whole department with Dee Dee for putting it over on her as blue. What am I going to do?" "Honest, Miss Sadie, I didn't know that she was your aunt and that her eyes was bad. I've seen you two together a lot and noticed her thick lenses, but I just didn't think." "Well, now I'm telling you." "I just thought she was some old girl up in the ribbons you was living with for company. Honest, I didn't know she had bad eyes. Gee!" "No, they ain't bad. Only she's so blind she reads her paper upside down and gets sore if you tell her about it." "And me thinking she was nothing but a near-sighted old grouch with a name like a sparrow." Miss Barnet laughed with an upward trill. "Dee Dee ain't her real name. When I was a kid and she took me to raise, that's the way I used to pronounce Aunt Edith. Gee! you don't think Dee Dee was the name they sprinkled on her when they christened her, did you?"