Well Mom I am trembling all over because it is all so sudden and after all I do think that Mr. Edgerton is a mighty fine man and I have never had nothing so lovely as an apartment and he is holding me close and I can hardly think straight but I says, “Oh Mr. Edgerton do not tempt me,” I says, “for I have always been a good girl and always gone straight.”
“Yes,” he says, “but there is nothing wrong with this for we are real friends.”
“But you have got a wife!” I says.
“But she does not care for me she is interested in that syker now.”
“But that is only for a moment,” I says, “and she does love you I know for I have saw it in her face and what is more I know that you love her because else why should you of been jealous of the syker? And then too I have got a fyansay and you know he is a good boy—”
“But my God Mamie will you go and throw yourself away on a shipping-clerk what kind of a life is that for an intellectual girl like you that is learned to understand all about international affairs?” he says. “Why you will go and live in some hole with him and you will have eleven babies and spend your life over a washtub and it is a crime.”
“I know it is hard,” I says, “but you talk about the plain people and what they think—”
“Oh to hell with the plain people!” he says. “That is all bunk and you know it”—just like that he says it and of course I am shocked and I do not want him to keep his arm around me then.
I says, “Mr. Edgerton,” I says, “you are going now to be a shirt-stuffer or whatever you call it for the brass kings and so I suppose you have got to feel like that about the plain people and trample them beneath your heel,” I says, “but I am going to stay one of them like I have always been because there is my Mom and my Pop and my kid brothers and sisters and a good honest boy that I have promised to wait for. And I am very much obliged to you and I like you very much as I have always done but it makes me sad to see that you are going to be cynical and lose all your ideals,” I says.
And so then he sees it is no use and he says, “Then you are going to stay a Field Grammarian Mame?”