"Oh, the girl she not have you because of that?" breathed Juanita. "Eet ees veree strange."
"Not so very strange," he asserted. "We'll say that she was a lady. Now it is a fact that nearly all ladies are extremely conventional in everything. They have a horror for the bizarre and the unconventional. They are shocked by the man who declines to be hampered with the fashion in clothes and in similar things. I could not fall in love with a girl who was not a lady."
"Begorra, you're an aristocrat at heart!" cried Mulloy. "Ye can't git away from it, me bhoy, no mather how much ye prate about socialism and th' brotherhood av mon."
"Still I protest you do not understand me."
"By gum!" muttered Gallup; "it don't seem to me that yeou are right 'bout the gals. Yeou kinder stick for the sort that's been born in the higher strata of life, as yeou call it. Ain't thar a hull lot of mighty smart ones that come out of the lower strata somewhere?"
"Oh, I admit that most of the brainy women and most of the brainy men come from the lower strata. Nevertheless, such women are not ladies."
"Begobs, ye make me tired!" cried Mulloy. "What you nade, Greg, is a dhoctor to look afther your liver."
"Mebbe the best doctor," grinned Gallup, "would be a girl he'd fall in love with and who'd fall in love with him. I guess she could cure him. If he happened to run across the right one and she axed him to give up his career and stop rampin' round over the country, I'll bet a good big punkin he'd cave in right on the spot."
"You're wrong," denied Carker. "No matter how much I cared for a girl, I could not give up my career. There was one once who asked me to give it up. She married another man."
He smiled as he made the confession, but in his eyes there was a look which told of the great sacrifice he had made.