"Don't I know it, Mrs. Schump! I always say if ever a girl would make some nice-earning, steady fellow a good wife, it's—"
'"Good wife'! That ain't the name! Why, Cora, for ten years that child has lifted me on my bad days and carried me and babied me like I was a queen. It's nothing for her to rub me two hours straight. Not a day before she leaves for work that she don't come to me and—"
"Fellows don't care about that kind of thing. A girl's got to have pep and something besides complexion and elbow-grease. I'm too fat."
"She's always sayin' she's too fat. With one pound off, would she look as good, Cora? If I hadn't been as plump as a partridge in my girl-days—and if I do say it myself, I was as fine a lookin' girl as my Stella—do you think Dave Schump would have had eyes for me? Not if I was ten times the woman I was for him."
"Sure she ain't too fat, Mrs. Schump. I always tell her it's her imagination. I know a girl bigger than she is that's keeping company with an expert piano-tuner. Why, I know girls twice her size. Stella's got a right good figure, she has."
"Lots of good it does me! I—It's just like my brains to go right to my hands, once you put me with a fellow. That time your brother Ed called for me for that party at your house—honest, I couldn't open my mouth to him."
"Can't understand it! 'Honest,' I says to Ed that time after the party, I says to him, 'Ed, why don't you go over and call on Stella Schump and take her to a movie or something? She's my idea of a girl, Stella is.' Think I could budge him? 'Naw,' was all I could get out of him. Just, 'Naw.' Honest, I could have shook him. But did he run down to that little flirt of a Gert Cobb's the very same night? He did. Honest, like I said to Arch, it makes me sick. Is it any wonder the world is filled with little flips like Gert Cobb, the way the fellows fall for 'em?"
"I never could be fresh with a boy. Take that time at your party. I bet your brother Ed would have liked me better if I'd have got out in the middle of the floor with him, like he wanted me to and like Gert did, to see who could blow the biggest bunch of suds off his stein. I never could be fresh with a fellow."
"That's just the trouble, Mrs. Schump. Stella don't see the difference between what's fresh and what's just fun. Is there anything wrong about one stein of beer in a jolly crowd? A girl can be nice without being goody-good. If there's anything a fellow hates, it's a goody-good. Take a fellow like Arch—you think he'd have any time for me if I wasn't a good-enough sport to take a glass of beer with him maybe once a week when he gets to feeling thirsty? Nothing rough. Everything in moderation, I always say. But there's a difference, Mrs. Schump, between being rough and being a goody-good."
"There's something in what you say, Cora. I've had her by me so much, maybe I've tried to raise her a little over-genteel. There ain't one single bad appetite she's got to be afraid of. It's not in her. I used to tell her poor father, one glass of beer could make him so crazy loony he never had to try how two tasted."