"I understand, Gert, but——"
"For two years and eight months, Jimmie, life has got to be worth while living to me because I could see the day, even if we—you—never talked about it, when you would be made over from a flip kid to—to the kind of a fellow would want to settle down to making a little two-by-four home for us. A little two-by-four all our own, with you steady on the job and advanced maybe to forty or fifty a week and——"
"For God's sake, Gertie, this ain't the time or the place to——"
"Oh yes, it is! It's got to be, because it's the first time in four weeks that you didn't see me coming first."
"But not now, Gert. I——"
"I'm not ashamed to tell you, Jimmie Batch, that I've been the making of you since that night you threw the wink at me. And—and it hurts, this does. God! how it hurts!"
He was pleating the table-cloth, swallowing as if his throat had constricted, and still rearing his head this way and that in the tight collar.
"I—never claimed not to be a bad egg. This ain't the time and the place for rehashing, that's all. Sure you been a friend to me. I don't say you haven't. Only I can't be bossed by a girl like you. I don't say May Scully's any better than she ought to be. Only that's my business. You hear? my business. I got to have life and see a darn sight more future for myself than selling shirts in a Fourteenth Street department store."
"May Scully can't give it to you—her and her fast crowd."
"Maybe she can and maybe she can't."