“You can’t, kid. I’ve always been on the level with you. I’ll take you over my knee and give you a spanking now if you don’t shut up. You talk silly. An ordinary hayseed from the hills—you better be thinking of Rankin with his private yachts, or little old Jimmy, your solid. You can’t complain. You’d better be content with what you got.”
“What do you mean, Nina? I only say I feel sort of ashamed. I never felt my skirts were short before in all my life. I did then.”
Nina only turned with a short laugh as she stooped to unfasten her own shoes in her progress towards her night toilet. Polly arose and went to the panel where protruded the handle of the wall bed which these two loyal and thrifty partners occupied in common. She pulled down the bed, went to the little wardrobe for her own night robe, and, moodily silent, prepared herself for sleep. At last she paused.
“Nina,” she said again, with a certain imperative quality in her tone.
“What is it, kid?” demanded her good-humored friend.
“You know what I think?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t think you think at all.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. Sometimes I think I’ve had about enough of this sort of thing. I’m sore on it. It makes me sick. All those men——”
“But if it was the ‘only, only, only man’?” grinned Nina.