arj?"

"Where?"

"Harry's."

"Well, I guess not."

"Buy you a dinner."

"But you're flat as your hand."

He set up a jingling in his left pocket. "I am, am I?"

"Well, I'm not going."

"When you going to cut this comedy, Marj?"

"I'm not. I'm just beginning."

"Breaking into high society, eh? Fine chance."

"Yes, with the gang of you down there hanging on like the plague, I got
a swell chance, nix."

"It's because we know you too well, Marj. Knew you when you had two
black pigtails and used to carry a bucket into the family entrance of
Harry's place, crying with madness every time your old man sent you.
Gad! I can see you yet, sweetness, with your big black eyes blacker than
ever, and steering home your old man from off a jamboree."

"God! sometimes I wake up in the night just like him and ma was still
alive and me and her was sitting there listening to him creak up the
stairs on his bad nights. I wake up, I can tell you, in a sweat--right
in a sweat."

"I knew you in them days, kiddo, just like you knew me. That's why you
can't pull nothing over on a fellow, kiddo, that's had as many pulls on
your all-day suckers as I have. You're a little quitter, you are, and
sometimes I think you're out for bigger game."

"It don't mean because a girl was born in the mud she's got to stick
there, does it?"

"No, but she can't pretend she don't know one of the old mud-turtles
when she sees one."

"Mud-turtle is the right name."

"The crowd has got your number, all right, kiddo; they know you're out
after bigger game. You're a little turncoat, that's what they say about
you."

"Turncoat! Who wouldn't turn a coat they was ashamed of? I guess you all
don't remember how I used to say, even back in those years when I was
taking tickets down at Lute's old Fourteenth Street Amusement Parlors,
how when my little minute came I was going to breeze away from the gang
down there?"

"I remember, all righty."

"How I was going to get me a job up-town here, where I could get in with
a decent crowd of girls, and not be known for the kind down there that
you and all of 'em knew I--I wasn't."

"Sure we knew."

"Yes, but what good does that do me? Can a dirty little yellow-haired
snip over in the Fancy Fruits give me the once-over and a turn-down?
She can. And why? Because I ain't certified. I come from a counterfeit
crowd, and who's going to take the trouble to find my number and see if
it's real?"

"Aw, now--"

"