“All your big-gun talk about the ring.  Of course I—­I’d like it.  How could a girl help liking it?  But only if it’s on the level.  Getaway—­you see, I hate to act suspicious all the time, but all your new silk shirts and now the new checked suit and all.  It don’t match up with your twenty-dollar job in the Wall Street haberdashery.”

Then Getaway threw out one of his feints of mock surprise.  “Didn’t I tell you, Fairylin?  Well, whadda you know about that?  I didn’t tell her, and me thinking I did.”

“What, Getaway, what?”

“Why, I’m not working there any more.  Why, Gawalmighty couldn’t have pleased that old screwdriver.  He was so tight the dimes in his pocket used to mildew from laying.  He got sore as a pup at me one day just because I—­”

“Getaway, you never told me you lost that job that I got for you out of the newspaper!”

“I didn’t lose it, Marylin.  I heard it when it fell.  Jobs is like vaccination, they take or they don’t.”

“They never take with you, Getaway.”

“Don’t you believe it.  I’m on one now—­”

“A job?”

“Aw, not the way you mean.  Me and a guy got a business proposition on.  If it goes through, I’ll buy you a marriage license engraved on solid gold.”

“What is it, then, the proposition?”

“Can’t you trust me, Marylin, for a day or two, until it goes through?  Sometimes just talking about it is enough to put the jinx on a good thing.”

“You mean—­”

“I mean I’m going to have money in my pockets.”

“What kind of money?”

“Real money.”

“Honest money?”

“Honest-to-God money.  And I’m going to dike you out.  That’s my idea.  Pink!  That’s the color for you.  A pink sash and slippers, and one of them hats that show your yellow hair right through it, and a lace umbrella and—­”

“And streamers on the hat!  I’ve always been just crazy for streamers on a hat.”

“Red-white-and-blue ones!”

“No, just pink.  Wide ones to dangle it like a basket.”

“And slippers with real diamond buckles.”

“What do you mean, Getaway?  How can you give me real diamond shoe buckles—­”

“There you go again.  Didn’t you promise to trust me and my new business proposition?”

“I do, only you’ve had so many—­”

“You do—­only! Yah, you do, only you don’t!”

“I—­You see—­Getaway—­I know how desperate you can be—­when you’re cornered.  I’ll never forget how you—­you nearly killed a cop—­once!  Oh, Getaway, when I think back, that time you got into such trouble with—­”

“Leave it to a woman, by Jove! to spoil a fellow’s good name, if she has to rub her fingers in old soot to do it.”

“I—­I guess it is from seeing so much around me all the time that it’s in me so to suspect.”

“Oh, it’s in you all right.  Gawalmighty knows that!”