ak
in the chest when you married him. I could have told you that you'd
be back here two years later selling leatherette vanity-cases and
supportin' a--"

"You! Jimmie Fitzgibbons, you--"

"Gad, Doll, go to it! When you color up like that you look like a
rose--a whole bouquet of them."

"You--you don't know nothing about him. He--he never knew he had a lung
till a month after the kid came, and they moved the gents' furnishing
over by the Broadway door where the draught caught him."

"Sure, he didn't, Doll; no harm meant. That's right, stand by him. I
like to see it. Why, a little queen across the counter from you tole me
you'd have married him if he'd had three bum lungs, that crazy you was!"

"Like fun! If me or him had dreamt he wasn't sound we--I wouldn't be in
this mess, I--we--I wouldn't!"

Her little face was pale as a spray of jessamine against a dark
background, and, try as she would to check them, tears sprang hot to her
eyes, dew trembled on her lashes.

"Poor little filly!"

More tears rushed to her eyes, as if he had touched the wellsprings of
her self-compassion. "You gotta excuse me, Jimmie. I ain't cryin', only
I'm dog tired from nursin' and drudgin', drudgin' and nursin'."

"Hard luck, little un!"

"Him layin' there and me tryin' to--to make things meet. You gotta
excuse me, Jimmie, I'm done up."

"That's why I wanna blow you, sweetness. I can't bear to see a little
filly like you runnin' with the odds dead agin her."

"You been swell to me, Jimmie."

"The sky's my limit, Doll."

"Maybe it wasn't right for me to go with you last Tuesday night, him
layin' there, and the kid and all, but a girl's gotta have something,
don't she, Jimmie? A girl that's got on her shoulders what I got has
gotta have something--a laugh now and then!"

"That's the goods, Doll. A little filly like you has got to."

"Honest, the way I laughed when you stuck them hothouse grapes on my
hat for trimming the other night, just like they didn't cost
nothing--honest, the way I laughed gimme enough strength for a whole
night's nursin'. Honest, I felt like in the old days before--before I
was married."

"Gad! if you had treated me white in them days, Doll--if you hadn't
pulled that saint stuff on me and treated me cold storage--there ain't
nothing I wouldn't have done for you."

"I--I didn't mean nothing, Jimmie."

"I ain't sore, Doll. I like you and I like your style. I always did,
even in the days when you turne