“Hanging round to see whether he’s coming, ain’t you? To think they shot Lincoln and let him live! Before I’d run after any man living, much less the excuse of a man like him! A shiny-haired, square-faced little rat like him!”
“I ain’t neither, waiting. I guess I got a right to find my gloves. I—I guess I gotta right. He’s as good as you are, and better. I—I guess I gotta right.” But the raspberry red of confusion dyed her face.
“No, you ain’t waiting! No, no; you ain’t waiting,” mimicked Miss Krakow, and her voice was like autumn leaves that crackle underfoot. “Well, then, if you ain’t waiting here he comes now. I dare you to come on home with me now, like you ought to.”
“I—you go on! I gotta tell him something. I guess I’m my own boss. I got to tell him something.”
Miss Krakow folded her well-worn hand bag under one arm and fastened her black cotton gloves.
“Pf-f-f! What’s the use of wasting breath!”
She slipped into the flux of the aisle, and the tide swallowed her and carried her out into the bigger tide of the street and the swifter tide of the city—a flower on the current, her blush withered under the arc-light substitution for sunlight, the petals of her youth thrown to the muddy corners of the city streets.
Sara Juke breathed inward, and under her cheaply pretentious lace blouse a heart, as rebellious as the pink in her cheeks and the stars in her eyes, beat a rapid fantasia; and, try as she would, her lips would quiver into a smile.
“Hello, Charley!”
“Hello yourself, Sweetness!” And, draping himself across the white-goods counter in an attitude as intricate as the letter S, behold Mr. Charley Chubb! Sleek, soap-scented, slim—a satire on the satyr and the haberdasher’s latest dash. “Hello, Sweetness!”