"No—honest, Jimmie! See—it ain't been touched; I didn't even let her go near the table's edge. She wanted to know when I was comin' back to the store—she says the corsets have run down since they got the new head saleslady, Jimmie."
"If I'd 'a' been here I'd 'a' told her you ain't going back."
"Sometimes I—I think I ain't, neither, Jimmie."
"What?"
"Nothin'."
"When you get well, ma, then I—"
"Then I'm going back on my job, Jimmie. Eighteen years—not countin' the three years your papa lived—at doing one thing sort of makes you married to it. I got my heart as set as always, Jimmie, on gettin' you in at the Electric Training School next door. If I hadn't broke down—"
"Nix for mine, ma!"
"Every day I sit by the window, Jimmie, and see the young engineers and electricians who board there goin' to work; and it breaks my heart to think of you, with your mind for inventions, runnin' the streets—a messenger boy—just when I was beginnin' to get where I could do for you."
"Aw, cut that, ma! Don't I work round on my dynamo every morning till I go on duty? Wouldn't I look swell with an electricity book under my arm? I'd feel like Battling John drinking tea out of an egg-shell."