"I know this little old burg too well," says I. "Why, with a hundred-dollar bill I can buy more society than you could put in a hall."
"But don't you see, Shorty," says she, "that the kind you can buy isn't worth having? You don't buy yours, do you? And I don't want to buy mine. I want to swap even. I'm not a freak, nor a foreigner, nor a quarantine suspect. Look at all these women going past—what's the difference between us? But they're not lonesome, I'll bet. They have friends and dear enemies by the hundreds, while I haven't either. There isn't a single home on this whole island where I can step up and ring the front door-bell. I feel like a tramp hanging to the back of a parlor-car. What good does my money do me? Suppose I want to take dinner at a swell restaurant—I wouldn't know the things to order, and I'd be afraid of the waiters. Think of that, Shorty."
I tried to; but it was a strain. If anyone else had put it up to me that Sadie Sullivan, with a roll of real money as big as a bale of cotton, could lose her nerve just because she didn't have a visitin'-list, I'd have told 'em to drop the pipe. She was giving me straight goods, though. Why, her lip was tremblin' like a lost kid's.
"Chuck it!" says I. "For a girl that had a whole bunch of Johnnies on the waitin' list, and her with only one best dress to her name at the time, you give me an ache. I don't set up for no great judge of form and figure; but my eyesight's still good, I guess, and if I was choosin' a likely looker, I'd back you against the field."
That makes her grin a little, and she pats my hand kind of sisterly like. "It isn't men I want, you goose; it's women—my own kind," says she, and the next minute she gives me the nudge and whispers: "Now, watch—the one in the chiffon Panama."
"Shiff which?" says I. But I sees the one she means—a heavy-weight person, rigged out like a dry-goods exhibit and topped off with millinery from the spring openin', coming toward us behind a pair of nervous steppers. She had her lamps turned our way, and I hears Sadie give her the time of day as sweet as you please. She wasn't more'n six feet off, either; but it missed fire. She stared right through Sadie, just as if there'd been windows in her, and then turned to cuddle a brindle pup on the seat beside her.
"Acts like she owed you money," says I.
"We swapped tales of domestic woe for two weeks at Colorado Springs season before last," said Sadie; "but it seems that she's forgotten. That's Mrs. Morris Pettigrew, whose husband—"
"That one?" says I. "Why, she ain't such a much, either. I know folks that think she's a joke."
"She feels that she can't afford to recognize me on Fifth-ave., just the same. That's where I stand," says Sadie.