've known Nellie Donovan to take as
many as three ice cream sodas and two phosphates a day when Eddie was
mixing. He had a way of throwing in a good-natured smile, and an easy
flow of conversation with every drink. While indulging in a little airy
persiflage the girls had a great little trick of pursing their mouths
into rosebud shapes over their soda straws, and casting their eyes upward
at Eddie. They all knew the trick, and its value, so that at night
Eddie's dreams were haunted by whole rows of rosily pursed lips, and seas
of upturned, adoring eyes. Of course we all noticed that on those rare
occasions when Josie Morehouse came into Kunz's her glass was heaped
higher with ice cream than that of any of the other girls, and that
Eddie's usually easy flow of talk was interspersed with certain
stammerings and stutterings. But Josie didn't come in often. She had a
lot of dignity for a girl of eighteen. Besides, she was taking the
teachers' examinations that summer, when the other girls were playing
tennis and drinking sodas.

Eddie really hated the soda water end of the business, as every soda
clerk in the world does. But he went about it good-naturedly. He really
wanted to learn the drug business, but the boss knew he had a drawing
card, and insisted that Eddie go right on concocting faerie queens and
strawberry sundaes, and nectars and Kunz's specials. One Saturday, when
he happened to have on hand an over-supply of bananas that would have
spoiled over Sunday, he invented a mess and called it the Eddie Extra,
and the girls swarmed on it like flies around a honey pot.

That kind of thing would have spoiled most boys. But Eddie had a
sensible mother. On those nights when he used to come home nauseated
with dealing out chop suey sundaes and orangeades, and saying that there
was no future for a fellow in our dead little hole, his mother would give
him something rather special for supper, and set him hoeing and watering
the garden.

So Eddie stuck to his job, and waited, and all the time he was saying,
with a melting look, to the last silly little girl who was drinking her
third soda, "Somebody looks mighty sweet in pink to-day," or while he was
doping to-morrow's ball game with one of the boys who dropped in for a
cigar, he was thinking of bigger things, and longing for a man-size job.

The man-size job loomed up before Eddie's dazzled eyes when he least
expected it. It was at the close of a particularly ho