, but there is. If I were pretty, like Rose Larsen--she's a girl that
stays where I live--oh! I could just eat her up, she's so pretty, curly
hair and big brown eyes and a round face like a boy in one of those
medieval pictures--"

"That's all right about pretty squabs. They're all right for a bunch of
young boys that like a cute nose and a good figger better than they do
sense-- Well, you notice I remembered you, all right, when you went and
forgot poor old Eddie Schwirtz. Yessir, by golly! teetotally plumb
forgot me. I guess I won't get over _that_ slam for a while."

"Now that isn't fair, Mr. Schwirtz; you know it isn't--it's almost dark
here on the porch, even with the lamps. I couldn't really see you. And,
besides, I _did_ recognize you--I just couldn't think of your name for
the moment."

"Yuh, that listens fine, but poor old Eddie's heart is clean busted just
the same--me thinking of you and your nice complexion and goldie hair
and the cute way you talked at our lunch--whenever Hunt shut up and gave
you a chance--honest, I haven't forgot yet the way you took off old
man--what was it?--the old stiff that ran the commercial college, what
was his name?"

"Mr. Whiteside?" Una was enormously pleased and interested. Far off and
dim were Miss Magen and the distressing Mrs. Lawrence; and the office of
Mr. Troy Wilkins was fading.

"Yuh, I guess that was it. Do you remember how you gave us an imitation
of him telling the class that if they'd work like sixty they might get
to be little tin gods on wheels like himself, and how he'd always keep
dropping his eye-glasses and fishing 'em up on a cord while he was
talking--don't you remember how you took him off? Why, I thought Mrs.
Hunt-that-is--I've forgotten what her name was before Sandy married
her--why, I thought she'd split, laughing. She admired you a whole pile,
lemme tell you; I could see that."

Not unwelcome to the ears of Una was this praise, but she was properly
deprecatory: "Why, she probably thought I was just a stuffy, stupid,
ugly old thing, as old as--"

"As old as Eddie Schwirtz, heh? Go on, insult me! I can stand it! Lemme
tell you I ain't forty-three till next October. Look here now, little
sister, I know when a woman admires another. Lemme tell you, if you'd
ever traveled for dry-goods like I did, out of St. Paul once, for a
couple of months--nev-er again; paint and varnish is good enough for
Eddie any day--and if you'd sold a bunch of women buyers