“I can’t help rememberin’,” she continued, “how fine I felt when I’d got that tip away from them men. I couldn’t wait till Danny come home that night. Once or twice I thought of tryin’ to locate him in some of them Broadway bootleggeries, but I stopped to think that mebbe some one else might be in on the line—some telephone girl—and spread the Whirlwind, Junior, stuff. You see, mister, when you’re bad yourself, you find yourself believin’ that everybody else is a crook, too. It’s caused by what you tell me is the sighological moment⸺”
“No,” interrupted the Boarder, “it is a psychic phenomena—a brain condition⸺”
“Put that in storage,” Mrs. Sweeny indignantly cut in. “Don’t you s’pose I know what I’m talkin’ about? Sighological moment is good enough for me. I heard Mrs. ‘Gold Dollar’ Cohen say that a few evenin’s ago, and she ain’t got nothin’ on me. If she can use them there words, I guess Belle Sweeny can. They don’t cost nothin’ and⸺”
The Boarder smiled.
“I meant no offense,” he said. “Won’t you please go on with the story?”
Mollified, the good lady gave her upturned nose the “going down” signal, and sailed forthwith into her yarn.
“Well,” she continued. “I was fidgety as a crate of hens till Danny come home. Then I told him all about what I’d heard.
“‘Belle,’ he says, when I’d shook it out of the trap, ‘you get a nice, new dress just for this. What does that there one cost you was tellin’ me about—the grape de foy grass?’ he says.
“‘Danny,’ I says, ‘it ain’t grapes, it’s crépe,’ I says. But I didn’t bother him with the rest of the name, b’cause I knowed he wouldn’t understand. I only mentioned somethin’ like two fifty, which was nearer his idea of information, and he stood for it.
“‘To-morruh,’ he says, ‘when I bring home the money,’ he says, ‘you get yours. I’ll go to it for a thousand,’ he says, ‘and when everything’s added up, there ought to be enough to pay our hired girl with, anyhow,’ he says. And with that he went to readin’ his paper, after havin’ asked when in—well, he wanted to know when dinner would be ready, he bein’ as hungry as never no man was b’fore. So I left him go ahead and read his paper, and we didn’t mention the horse again till the next day.