ndred-a-month clerk,
the way you can win the trade, but never your own boss. I know what I'm
talking about. I know your measure better than any human on earth can
ever know your measure. I know things about you that you don't even know
yourself."

"I never set myself up to nobody for anything I wasn't."

"Maybe not, Jimmie, but I know about you and--and that Central Street gang
that time, and--"

"You!"

"Yes, honey, and there's not another human living but me knows how little
it was your fault. Just bad company, that was all. That's how much I--I
love you, Jimmie, enough to understand that. Why, if I thought May Scully
and a set-up in business was the thing for you, Jimmie, I'd say to her, I'd
say, if it was like taking my own heart out in my hand and squashing it,
I'd say to her, I'd say, 'Take him, May.' That's how I--I love you, Jimmie.
Oh, ain't it nothing, honey, a girl can come here and lay herself this low
to you--"

"Well, haven't I just said you--you deserve better."

"I don't want better, Jimmie. I want you. I want to take hold of your life
and finish the job of making it the kind we can both be proud of. Us two,
Jimmie, in--in our own decent two-by-four. Shopping on Saturday nights.
Frying in our own frying-pan in our own kitchen. Listening to our own
phonograph in our own parlor. Geraniums and--and kids--and--and things.
Gas-logs. Stationary washtubs. Jimmie! Jimmie!"

Mr. James P. Batch reached up for his hat and overcoat, cramming the
newspaper into a rear pocket.

"Come on," he said, stalking toward the side door and not waiting to see
her to her feet.

Outside, a banner of stars was over the narrow street. For a chain of five
blocks he walked, with a silence and speed that Miss Slayback could only
match with a running quickstep. But she was not out of breath. Her head was
up, and her hand, where it hooked into Mr. Batch's elbow, was in a vise
that tightened with each block.

You who will mete out no other approval than that vouched for by the stamp
of time and whose contempt for the contemporary is from behind the easy
refuge of the classics, suffer you the shuddering analogy that between
Aspasia who inspired Pericles, Theodora who suggested the Justinian code,
and Gertie Slayback who commandeered Jimmie Batch, is a sistership which
rounds them, like a lasso thrown back into time, into one and the same
petticoat dynasty behind the throne.

True, Gertie Slayback's _mise en scene_ was a two-