“Oh, but there is. If I were pretty, like Rose Larsen—she’s a girl that stays where I live—oh! I could just eat her up, she’s so pretty, curly hair and big brown eyes and a round face like a boy in one of those medieval pictures—”
“That’s all right about pretty squabs. They’re all right for a bunch of young boys that like a cute nose and a good figger better than they do sense— Well, you notice I remembered you, all right, when you went and forgot poor old Eddie Schwirtz. Yessir, by golly! teetotally plumb forgot me. I guess I won’t get over that slam for a while.”
“Now that isn’t fair, Mr. Schwirtz; you know it isn’t—it’s almost dark here on the porch, even with the lamps. I couldn’t really see you. And, besides, I did recognize you—I just couldn’t think of your name for the moment.”
“Yuh, that listens fine, but poor old Eddie’s heart is clean busted just the same—me thinking of you and your nice complexion and goldie hair and the cute way you talked at our lunch—whenever Hunt shut up and gave you a chance—honest, I haven’t forgot yet the way you took off old man—what was it?—the old stiff that ran the commercial college, what was his name?”
“Mr. Whiteside?” Una was enormously pleased and interested. Far off and dim were Miss Magen and the distressing Mrs. Lawrence; and the office of Mr. Troy Wilkins was fading.
“Yuh, I guess that was it. Do you remember how you gave us an imitation of him telling the class that if they’d work like sixty they might get to be little tin gods on wheels like himself, and how he’d always keep dropping his eye-glasses and fishing’em up on a cord while he was talking—don’t you remember how you took him off? Why, I thought Mrs. Hunt-that-is—I’ve forgotten what her name was before Sandy married her—why, I thought she’d split, laughing. She admired you a whole pile, lemme tell you; I could see that.”
Not unwelcome to the ears of Una was this praise, but she was properly deprecatory: “Why, she probably thought I was just a stuffy, stupid, ugly old thing, as old as—”
“As old as Eddie Schwirtz, heh? Go on, insult me! I can stand it! Lemme tell you I ain’t forty-three till next October. Look here now, little sister, I know when a woman admires another. Lemme tell you, if you’d ever traveled for dry-goods like I did, out of St. Paul once, for a couple of months—nev-er again; paint and varnish is good enough for Eddie any day—and if you’d sold a bunch of women buyers, you’d know how they looked when they liked a thing, alrightee! Not that I want to knock The Sex, y’ understand, but you know yourself, bein’ a shemale, that there’s an awful lot of cats among the ladies—God bless’em—that wouldn’t admit another lady was beautiful, not if she was as good-looking as Lillian Russell, corking figger and the swellest dresser in town.”
“Yes, perhaps—sometimes,” said Una.
She did not find Mr. Schwirtz dull.