“That’s not answering.”

“Well, whadda you know!  Miss Sherlock Holmes finds a corkscrew in the wine cellar and is sore because it’s crooked!”

“Getaway—­answer.”

“Whadda you want me to answer, Fairylin?  That I’m the master mind behind the—­”

“It worries me so!  You up in Monkey’s room so much lately.  You think I don’t know it?  I do!  All the comings and goings up there.  Muggs Towers sneaking up to Monkey’s room in that messenger boy’s suit he keeps wearing all the time now.  He’s no more messenger boy than I am.  Getaway, tell me, you and Muggs up in Monkey’s room so often?  Footsteps up there!  Yours!”

“Gawalmighty!  Now it’s my footsteps!”

“I know them!  Up in Monkey’s room, right over mine.  I know how you sneak up there evenings after you leave me.  It don’t look nice your going into the same house where I live, Getaway, even if it isn’t to see me.  It don’t look right from the outside!”

“Nobody can ever say I wanted to harm a hair of your little head.  I even look the other way when I pass your door.  That’s the kind of a modest violet I am.”

“It’s not that, but the looks.  That’s the reason, I’ll bet, if the truth’s known, why Monkey squirmed himself into that room over mine—­to hide your comings and goings as if they was to see me.”

“Nothing of the kind!”

“Everything—­up there—­worries me so!  Monkey’s room right over mine.  My ceiling so full of soft footsteps that frighten me.  I know your footsteps, Getaway, just as well as anything.  The ball-of-your-foot—­squeak!  The-ball-of-your-foot—­squeak!”

“Well, that’s a good one!  The-ball-of-me-foot—­squeak!”

“Everybody tiptoeing!  Muggs!  Somebody’s stocking feet!  Monkey’s.  Steps that aren’t honest.  All on my ceiling.  Monkey never ought to have rented a room in a respectable house like Mrs. Granady’s.  Nobody but genteel young fellows holding down genteel jobs ever had that room before.  Monkey passing himself off as Mr. James Pollard, or whatever it is he calls himself, just for the cover of a respectable house—­or of me, for all I know.  You could have knocked me down with a feather the first time I met him in the hall.  If I did right I’d squeal.”

“You would, like hell.”

“Of course I wouldn’t, but with Mrs. Granady trying to run a respectable house, only the right kind of young fellows and girls rooming there, it’s not fair.  Monkey getting his nose into a house like that and hatching God knows what!  Getaway, what do you keep doing up in that room—­all hours—­you and all the pussyfooters?”

“That’s the thanks a fellow gets for letting a straight word like ‘marry’ slip between his teeth; that’s the thanks a fellow gets for honest-to-God intentions of trying to get his girl out of a shirt factory and dike her out in—­”

“But, Getaway, if I was only sure it’s all straight!”

“Well, if that’s all you think of me—­”