Miss Barnet held backward, a little singsong note of appeal running through her voice. Miss Worte jerked forward toward the open door. April dusk, the color of cold dish-water, showed through it. Dusk in the city comes sadly, crowding into narrow streets and riddled with an immediate quick-shot of electric bulbs. "'Ain't you got no sense a-tall? 'Ain't you got no sense in that curly head of yourn but ruination notions?" "Aw, Dee Dee!" They were in the flood tide which bursts through the dam at six o'clock like a human torrent flooding the streets, then spreading, thinning, and finally seeping into homes, hall bedrooms, and Harlem flats. Miss Edith Worte turned her sparse face toward the down-town tide and against a light wind that tasted of rain and napped her skirts around her thin legs. "Watch out, Dee Dee! Step down; there's a curb." "I don't need you. It's lots you care if I go blind on the spot." "Dee Dee!" "God! if I didn't have nothing to worry me but red ribbons! I told the doctor to-day while he was putting the drops in my eyes, that if he'd let me go blind I--I--" "Now, now, Dee Dee! Ain't you seeing better these last few days?" "If you had heard what the doctor told me to-day when he put the drops in my eyes you'd have something to think about besides red ribbon, alrighty." "I forgot, Dee Dee, to-day was your eye-doctor day. He's always scarin' you up. Just don't pay no attention. I forgot it was your day." "Sure you forgot. But you won't forget if I wake up alone in the dark some day." "Dee Dee!" "You won't forget then. You won't forget to nag me even then for duds to go automobiling with fly men that can't bring you no good." "Dee Dee, I 'ain't been but one night this week. I been saving up all my nights for--for to-night." "To-night. Say, I can't keep you from going to the devil on skates if--" "It's only the second time this week, Dee Dee, and I--I promised. He'll have the limousine top off to-night--and feel, it is just like summer. A girl's gotta have a little something once in a while." "What do I gotta have? What do I gotta have but slave and work?" "It's different with you, Dee Dee. You're older even than my mamma was, and didn't you say when you and her was girls together there wasn't a livelier two sisters? Now didn't you, Dee Dee?" "In a respectable way, yes. But there wasn't the oily-mouthed, bald-headed divorced man alive, with little rat eyes and ugly lips, who could have took me or your mamma out auto-riding before or after dark. We was working-girls, too, but there wasn't a man didn't take off his hat to us, even if he was bald-headed and it was twenty below zero." "Aw!" "Yes, 'aw'! You keep running around with the kind of men that don't look at a girl unless she's served up with rum-sauce and see where it lands you. Just keep running if you want to, but my money don't buy you no red ribbons to help to drive you to the devil!"