"'Say, you cradle robbing old pork barrel, back stage for you in a hurry or I'll sic the dangle wagon onto you. Skidoo now and no back talk, or I'll read about you in the morning papers with great eclat,' I says.
"He does a little Swiss yodle or something back in his throat and then he notices a big boy in a blue suit swingin' a piece of mahogany comin' our way and he don't stop to tip his hat.
"The little dear don't understand it all, but she's bright, if unsophisticated, and I could have just hugged her right there on the street for trusting me in comparison to him, as smug and sleek as Father O'Hara, though that's as far as the comparison goes.
"I takes the little darling over to the North Side with me to the home of a fine little actor and his wife, who are more for real home than they are for the gay life. And they don't ask no questions, but just take her right in to their hearthside.
"Little Madge was too proud for them, though, even if she had been an orphan and allowed herself to be given a home when she was too small to work and didn't know how to beg, much less spurn any charity.
"She goes out every day to look for work. She don't find anybody that wants to hire a girl in a made-over alpaca and clodhopper shoes, though her form and figure is something you don't see in them automobiles that whizz up and down on the boulevards.
"She tries to get into a show company, being of that temperament and having a real voice, and she has some narrow escapes from bumping up against fake booking agencies that would have sold her into the same kind of a gilded palace of sin Uncle Dave had cooked up for her.
"One day, when she's walking on State street, so shoddy that her little bare feet are touching the pavement through the holes in her soles, she sees a big sign and the wigs in the windows of Burnham's hair store.
"She goes in there. A clerk steps up to her, kind of smart-like, and she almost bowls him over. She just reached up, pulls out a couple of pins, takes off her hat and down drops a regular Niagara of Titian tinted tresses.
"'How much for this?' she asks him.