Gaslight Sonatas. Fannie Hurst
I do know it, Jimmie! I been one too many for the last four Saturday nights. I been one too many ever since May Scully came into five hundred dollars' inheritance and quit the Ladies' Neckwear. I been one too many ever since May Scully became a lady."
"If I was a girl and didn't have more shame!"
"Shame! Now you're shouting, Jimmie Batch. I haven't got shame, and I don't care who knows it. A girl don't stop to have shame when she's fighting for her rights."
He was leaning on his elbow, profile to her. "That movie talk can't scare me. You can't tell me what to do and what not to do. I've given you a square deal all right. There's not a word ever passed between us that ties me to your apron-strings. I don't say I'm not without my obligations to you, but that's not one of them. No, sirree—no apron-strings."
"I know it isn't, Jimmie. You're the kind of a fellow wouldn't even talk to himself for fear of committing hisself."
"I got a date here now any minute, Gert, and the sooner you—"
"You're the guy who passed up the Sixty-first for the Safety First regiment."
"I'll show you my regiment some day."
"I—I know you're not tied to my apron-strings, Jimmie. I—I wouldn't have you there for anything. Don't you think I know you too well for that? That's just it. Nobody on God's earth knows you the way I do. I know you better than you know yourself."
"You better beat it, Gertie. I tell you I'm getting sore."
Her face flashed from him to the door and back again, her anxiety almost edged with hysteria. "Come on, Jimmie—out the side entrance before she gets here. May Scully ain't the company for you. You think if she was, honey, I'd—I'd see myself come butting in between you this way, like—like a—common girl? She's not the girl to keep you straight. Honest to God she's not, honey."
"My business is my business, let me tell you that."
"She's speedy, Jimmie. She was the speediest girl on the main floor, and now that she's come into those five hundred, instead of planting it for a rainy day, she's quit work and gone plumb crazy with it."
"When I want advice about my friends I ask for it."
"It's not her good name that worries me, Jimmie, because she 'ain't got any. It's you. She's got you crazy with that five hundred, too—that's what's got me scared."
"Gee! you ought to let the Salvation Army tie a bonnet under your chin."
"She's always had her eyes on you, Jimmie. 'Ain't you men got no sense for seein' things? Since the day they moved the Gents' Furnishings across from the Ladies' Neckwear she's had you spotted. Her goings-on used to leak down to the basement, alrighty. She's not a good girl, May ain't, Jimmie. She ain't, and you know it. Is she? Is she?"
"Aw!" said Jimmie Batch.
"You see! See! 'Ain't got the nerve to answer, have you?"
"Aw—maybe I know, too, that she's not the kind of a girl that would turn up where she's not—"
"If you wasn't a classy-looking kind of boy, Jimmie, that a fly girl like May likes to be seen out with, she couldn't find you with magnifying glasses, not if you was born with the golden rule in your mouth and had swallowed it. She's not the kind of girl, Jimmie, a fellow like you needs behind him. If—if you was ever to marry her and get your hands on them five hundred dollars—"
"It would be my business."
"It'll be your ruination. You're not strong enough to stand up under nothing like that. With a few hundred unearned dollars in your pocket you—you'd go up in spontaneous combustion, you would."
"It would be my own spontaneous combustion."
"You got to be drove, Jimmie, like a kid. With them few dollars you wouldn't start up a little cigar-store like you think you would. You and her would blow yourselves to the dogs in two months. Cigar-stores ain't the place for you, Jimmie. You seen how only clerking in them was nearly your ruination—the little gambling-room-in-the-back kind that you pick out. They ain't cigar-stores; they're only false faces for gambling."
"You know it all, don't you?"
"Oh, I'm dealing it to you straight! There's too many sporty crowds loafing around those joints for a fellow like you to stand up under. I found you in one, and as yellow-fingered and as loafing as they come, a new job a week, a—"
"Yeh, and there was some pep to variety, too."
"Don't throw over, Jimmie, what my getting you out of it to a decent job in a department store has begun to do for you. And you're making good, too. Higgins told me to-day, if you don't let your head swell, there won't be a fellow in the department can stack up his sales-book any higher."
"Aw!"
"Don't throw it all over, Jimmie—and me—for a crop of dyed red hair and a few dollars to ruin yourself with."
He shot her a look of constantly growing nervousness, his mouth pulled to an oblique, his glance constantly toward the door.
"Don't keep no date with her to-night, Jimmie. You haven't got the constitution to stand her pace. It's telling on you. Look at those fingers yellowing again—looka—"
"They're my fingers, ain't they?"
"You see, Jimmie, I—I'm the only person in the world that likes you just for what—you ain't—and hasn't got any pipe dreams about you. That's what counts, Jimmie, the folks that like you in spite, and not because of."
"We will now sing psalm number two hundred and twenty-three."
"I know there's not a better fellow in the world if he's kept nailed to the right job, and I know, too, there's not another fellow can go to the dogs any easier."
"To hear you talk, you'd think I was about six."
"I'm the only girl that'll ever be willing to make a whip out of herself that'll keep you going and won't sting, honey. I know you're soft and lazy and selfish and—"
"Don't forget any."
"And I know you're my good-looking good-for-nothing, and I know, too, that you—you don't care as much—as much for me from head to toe as I do for your little finger. But I—I like you just the same, Jimmie. That—that's what I mean about having no shame. I—do like you so—so terribly, Jimmie."
"Aw now—Gert!"
"I know it, Jimmie—that I ought to be ashamed. Don't think I haven't cried myself to sleep with it whole nights in succession."
"Aw now—Gert!"
"Don't think I don't know it, that I'm laying myself before you pretty common. I know it's common for a girl to—to come to a fellow like this, but—but I haven't got any shame about it—I haven't got anything, Jimmie, except fight for—for what's eating me. And the way things are between us now is eating me."
"I—Why, I got a mighty high regard for you, Gert."
"There's a time in a girl's life, Jimmie, when she's been starved like I have for something of her own all her days; there's times, no matter how she's held in, that all of a sudden comes a minute when she busts out."
"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