His enemy stood with downcast eyes, the red slowly mounting to the smoothed-back brown hair.
"Sissy's Number One in her class," ventured Frank, as a recommendation.
"I'm not!" flamed forth Sissy. "I never was, or—or if I was it was because of—of—"
"Why, Sissy!" interjected Miss Madigan, grieved.
"Of a mistake of some sort," suggested the savior, soothingly. "Well, I suppose I could marry a girl that was only Number Two."
"I'm never Number Two—never! I'm Number—Twenty!" Sissy's eyes were raised for a moment to his—a revelation of the insulted dignity seething within her.
"Oh, well, a Number Twenty wife is good enough; but we'd have to live in Ireland, I suppose," said the savior, philosophically.
A passion of wrath at his dullness filled the clever Sissy, and she sought for a moment before she found the weapon to hurt him.
"In Ireland, you know," she said, as deliberately as she could for fear of breaking into tears before she had delivered the insult, "the pigs live in the parlor, and—and the children have no place to sleep and—go barefooted!"
"Oh!" The savior was stunned for an instant, but he recovered. "No, I didn't know. But in Nevada, I'm told, the Indians eat Irishmen alive, and those that are left are shot down by white desperados on C Street every day just at noon! We couldn't live here, could we?"