Much as it hurt her to hurt him, she laughed her answer: "As soon as I get me fingers on a job that'll pay me six dollars a week, we'll have Father Kelly say the words for us." "But Katie"--he used to say "Gatie" until she had teased him out of it--"you don' mean dot! You said--you dold me--you bromise----" He floundered in the breakers of amazement. She turned her face away, and looked out of the window at the gigantic mockery of Liberty in the harbor; but she could not find it in her heart long to remain silent. She faced him once more. "It's no use, Hermann," she said, her eyes very big and serious. "Here y'are goin' to Schleger's place with your first good chance at a way as'll lead you to somethin' worth workin' for--you said yourself it might end in a café o' your own--an' to get there you'll be needin' every blessed cent you can save. Do you think now I could look at meself in the glass mornin's if I married you an' kep' you down? No, thank God, I'm not so bad as that." He sputtered toward a protest, but she waved him down. "Now don't be tellin' me that two can live as cheap as one," she said. "I seen that pleasant lie nailed this many a year, an' I know more about housekeepin' in five minutes than you can learn in a lifetime. Things was plenty bad five years past, an' now they're worse yet. What rent is you know, an' what clothes is you can't even guess. Here's beefsteak at twenty-two cents the pound; veal up to thirty an' still goin' up. The papers make a fuss an' get the prices down three cents for three days, an' then the dealers put them up again when none's lookin'. An' as for eggs, you can pay seventy-five cents a dozen for them, winters, with the hour an' minute of the layin' stamped on them, if you're a millionaire, or you can get nine for a quarter if you hold your nose." The hopeful Hermann shook his blonde head. "But Katie," he said, "I don' gare if I neffer ged a gafé off my own. I don' vant a gafé: I vant you." She smiled again. "You flatter me by the choice," she said; "but if we can get along without the drink, we can't get along without a bite to eat now an' then. No, Hermann-boy, it's no use, I'm tellin' you. I seen it tried. Me father swang a pick and me mother took in washin'--when she could get it--an' even then it wouldn't work: the one would have starved to death if the third rail hadn't got him, an' poor mother killed herself tryin' to keep her an' me. It won't work, an' I know it." While the train hurried above the dead level of Brooklyn houses, out through the suburban monstrosities and across the dunes, the optimist, still an optimist, renewed his endeavors to find the chance for lodging his own arguments; but all the while Katie continued to overwhelm him with a flow of errors. They had almost reached the sandy island before Hermann, still stubbornly hopeful, elected to drop the subject for the present, and took up, in its stead, the story of Violet.