"Enough to wreck most any career, wasn't it?" goes on Millie. "Think of it! Me, who'd come down to New York with my head so full of ambitions there wasn't any room to catch cold, and then in a little over a year to go and marry the first good-natured Irishman that asked me! You see, I'm only half Irish myself,--Mother was Argentine Spanish,--which makes me so different from Tim. Look at him! Would you dream he had a bit of sense? But he's--oh, he's Tim, that's all. And not many of 'em come better. Driving a motor truck, he was, and satisfied at that. It was up at a Terrace Garden dance we got acquainted. No music at all in his head; but in his feet--say, he just naturally has to let his toes follow the tune, and if ragtime hadn't been invented he'd have walked slow all his life. And me? Well, I ought to dance, with Father a born fiddler, and Mother brought up with castanets in her hands. We danced twelve of the fourteen numbers together that night, and I never even noticed he had red hair. I'd been dying to dance for months. Some partner, Tim was too. That began it. We joined a class and started learning the new steps. And almost before I knew it I was Mrs. Moran. We'd been married nearly a month before I woke up to what a fool thing I'd done. There I was, tryin' to feed and clothe two people, besides payin' the rent and furniture installments, all on sixteen per. I got a job as cashier in a quick lunch place next day. Tim didn't like it a bit; did you, Tim?" Mr. Moran grins good-natured. "That's the way he stormed around at home," says Millie. "But I had a scheme. We'd seen some of this dancing done on the stage, not much better than we could do ourselves. 'Tim dear,' says I, 'we've been dancing for the fun of it. It's the best thing you do. Now let's make it pay.' He thought I was crazy. I believe he had an idea he was born to drive a gasoline truck, and that it would be wicked to try anything else. But I do the heavy thinking for the Moran family. I nearly starved him until I'd saved out a tenspot. Then I went to the best tango professor I could find and took an hour lesson. Next I taught Tim. We cleared out our little dining room and had our meals off the gas range. My next splurge was a music machine and some dance records. One Saturday Tim brought home two dollars for overtime, and that night we watched Maurice from the second balcony. Then we really began practicing. Why, some nights I kept him at it for four hours on a stretch. He weighed one hundred and eighty at the start; but now he's down to one hundred and forty-three. But it's been good for him. And trying to keep all those new variations in his head--why, he's almost learned to think! Say, you know you can get almost anything by keeping at it. And Tim and I have learned rag dancing, all there is to it, besides some I've made up. All we need now is a chance, and it's such scum as old Bloom that keeps us out. Do you blame me for landing on his hat?"