"If you'll allow me," says he, "I'll attend to the tag business. They'll be delighted to meet you."
"Say," says I, soon as he'd left, "don't be a sieve, Sadie. Just forget auld lang syne, and remember that you're travelin' high."
"They've got to take me for what I am, or not at all," says she.
"Yes, but you ain't got no cue to tell the story of your life," says I.
"That's my whole stock in trade, Shorty," says she.
I was lookin' for her to revise that notion when I sees the kind of company Pinckney was luggin' up to spring on us. I'd seen their pictures in the papers, and knew 'em on sight. And the pair wasn't anything but the top of the bunch. You know the Twombley-Cranes, that cut more ice in July than the Knickerbocker Trust does all winter. Why say, to see the house rubber at 'em as they came sailin' our way, you'd thought they was paid performers stepping up to do their act. It was a case of bein' in the lime-light for us, from that on.
"Hully chee!" says I. "Here's where I ought to fade."
But there wasn't any show to duck; for Felix was chasin' over some more chairs, and Pinckney was doin' the honors all round, and the first thing I knew we was a nice little fam'ly party, chuckin' repartee across the pink candle shades, and behavin' like star boarders that had paid in advance.
It was Sadie, though, that had the centre of the stage, and I'll be staggered if she didn't jump in to make her bluff good. She let out everything that she shouldn't have told, from how she used to wait on table at her mother's boarding-house, to the way she'd got the frozen face ever since she came to town.
"But what am I expected to do?" says she. "I've got no Hetty Green grip on my bankbook. There's a whole binful of the 'Drowsy Drop' dollars, and I'm willing to throw 'em on the bonfire just as liberal as the next one, only I want a place around the ring. There's no fun in playing a lone hand, is there? I've been trying to find out what's wrong with me, anyway?"