"If there ever was a girl in my place had a square deal, that girl's been you."
"'Square deal!' Because after I held on and—ate out my heart for three years, you didn't—take away my job, too? Somebody ought to pin a Carnegie medal on you!"
"You've held down a twenty-dollar-a-week job season in and season out, when there've been times it didn't even pay for the ink it took to write you on the pay-roll."
"There's nothing I ever got out of you I didn't earn three times over."
"A younger figure than yours is getting to be wouldn't hurt the line any, you know. It's because I make it a rule not to throw off the old girls when their waist-lines begin to spread that makes you so grateful, is it? There's not a firm in town keeps on a girl after she begins to heavy up. If you got to know why I took you off the dress line and put you in the wraps, it's because I seen you widening into a thirty-eight, and a darn poor one at that. I can sell two wraps off Cissie to one off you. You're getting hippy, girl, and, since you started the subject, you can be darn glad you know where your next week's salary's coming from."
She was reddening so furiously that even her earlobes, their tips escaping beneath the turban, were tinged.
"Maybe I—I'm getting hippy, Kess; but it'll take more than anything you can ever do for me to make up for—"
"Gad!" he said, flipping an ash in some disgust, "I wish I had a ten-cent piece for every one since!"
"Oh," she cried, her throat jerking, "you eat what you just said! You eat it, because you know it ain't so!"
"Now look here," he said, straightening up suddenly, "I don't know what your game is, but if you're here to stir up the old dust that's been laid for five years—"