, well! In the
spring the young man's fancy gently turns--"

"Ah, say!" says I. "There ain't no call for any funny cracks about this.
You know me, and you can guess I'm no Willie-boy. When I get a soft spot
in my head, and try to win a queen, it'll be done on the dead quiet, and
you won't hear no call for help. But this is a different proposition.
This is a real lady, who's been locked out by the society trust, and who
takes an invite from me just because we happened to know each other when
we was kids."

"Oh-ho!" says Pinckney, snappin' them black eyes the way he does when he
gets real waked up. "That sounds quite romantic."

"It ain't," says I. "It's just as reg'lar as takin' your aunt to a
sacred concert."

He seemed to want to know the details, though; so I told him all about
Sadie, and how she'd been ruled out of her class by a lot of stiffs who
wa'n't one-two-sixteen with her, either for looks or lucre.

"And it's a crooked decision," says I. "Maybe Sadie wasn't brought up by
a Swedish maid and a French governess from Chelsea, Mass.; but she's on
velvet now, and she's a real hand-picked pippin, too. What's more, she's
a nice little lady, with nothin' behind her that you couldn't print in a
Sunday-school weekly. All she aims to do is to travel with the
money-burners and be sociable. And say, that's natural, ain't it?"

"It's quite human," says Pinckney, "and what you've told me about her is
very interesting. I hope the little supper goes off all right. Ta-ta,
Shorty."

Well, it began frosty enough; for when it came to pilotin' a lady into
that swell mob, I had the worst case of stage-fright you ever saw. Say,
them waiters is a haughty-lookin' lot, ain't they? But after we'd found
Felix, and I'd passed him a ten-spot, and he'd bowed and scraped and
towed us across the room like he thought we held a mortgage on the
place, I didn't feel quite so much as if I'd got into the wrong flat.

I did have something of a chill when I caught sight of a
sheepish-looking cuss in the glass. He looked sort of familiar, and I
was wondering what he'd done to be ashamed of, when I sees it was me.
Then I squints around at the other guys and say, more'n half of 'em wore
the same kind of a look. It was only the women that seemed right to
home. There wasn't one in sight that didn't have her chin up and her
shoulders back, and carrying all the dog the law allows. They treated
them stiff-necked food-slingers like they was a lot of w