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156 "I started to tell you that she won't never giv' him up. She's one of the forever-after kind—damn fools, too, for as far as the men are concerned, that Roomyo an' Jooliet stuff's the bunk—" she sawed the air, sidewise, with a gesture of utter disgust— "An' I'd stack my pile that that Mr. Roomyoh, soon as he left Jooly lyin' there stiff an' cold, lamped some other dame at the exit an' giv' her the high sign.

"But to get back to this kiddo,—there's too much smalltown about her—y'know, blush all over when anyone menshuns legs, what we most cert'nly all got. Yep, she'd make nice apple tarts from your farm out there, an' sweep the porch clean, an' on Sundays doll up like a reg'lar curly-haired baby-doll. But she'd never do for you, kiddo, you gotta have pep an' good rag—why, all you could do when yuh get all het up is to play the organ an' look at the photygraft album, by Heck!" Here she snapped her fingers and executed that rustic shuffle, by which pieces of business her kind always know that beings from beyond their own sacred purlieus hold the boards.

"An', an'," she wound up, "Philip, me bhhoy, you'd have plenty of babies, oodles uv 'em—like rabbits. You'd make a swell father walkin' the floor with 'em, wouldn't you, now?"

For further derision she hummed a popular favourite of the day—"When Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit Rented a Harlem Flat," it was called with pantomime of infant-on-each-arm, until Philip writhed and reached for the flask. But Carlotta, who was surprising both herself and him that night, snatched it away.