“You see, it’s because I’ve seen so much all my life.  That’s why it’s been so grand these last years since I’m alone and—­and away from it.  Nothing to fear.  My own little room and my own little job and me not getting heart failure every time I recognize a plain-clothes man on the beat or hear a night stick on the sidewalk jerk me out of my sleep.  Getaway, don’t do anything bad.  You had one narrow escape.  You’re finger-printed.  Headquarters wouldn’t give you the benefit of a doubt if there was one.  Don’t—­Getaway!”

“Yah, stay straight and you’ll stay lonesome.”

“Money wouldn’t make no difference with me, anyway, if everything else wasn’t all right.  Nothing can be pink to me even if it is pink, unless it’s honest.  That’s why I hold back, Getaway—­there’s things in you I—­can’t trust.”

“Yah, fine chance of you holding back if I was to come rolling up to your door in a six-cylinder—­”

“I tell you, no!  If I was that way I wouldn’t be holding down the same old job at the factory.  I know plenty of boys who turn over easy money.  Too easy—­”

“Then marry me, Marylin, and you’ll wear diamonds.  In a couple of days, when this goes through, this deal with the fellows—­oh, honest deal, if that’s what you’re opening your mouth to ask—­I can stand up beside you with money in my pockets.  Twenty bucks to the pastor, just like that!  Then you can pick out another job and I’ll hold it down for you.  Bet your life I will—­Oh—­here, Marylin—­this way—­quick!”

“Getaway, why did you turn down this street so all of a sudden?  This isn’t my way home.”

“It’s only a block out of the way.  Come on!  Don’t stand gassing.”

“You-thought-that-fellow-on-the-corner-of-Dock-Stre
et-might-be-a-plain -clothes-man!”

“What if I did?  Want me to go up and kiss him?”

“Why-should-you-care, Getaway?”

“Don’t.”

“But—­”

“Don’t believe in hugging the law, though.  It’s enough when it hugs you.”

“I want to go home, Getaway.”

“Come on.  I’ll buy some supper.  Steak and French frieds and some French pastry with a cherry on top for your little sweet tooth.  That’s the kind of a regular guy I am.”

“No.  I want to go home.”

“All right, all right!  I’m taking you there, ain’t I?”

“Straight.”

“Oh, you’ll go straight, if you can’t go that way anywhere but home.”

They trotted the little detour in silence, the corners of her mouth wilting, he would have declared, had he the words, like a field flower in the hands of a picnicker.  Marylin could droop that way, so suddenly and so whitely that almost a second could blight her.

“Now you’re mad, ain’t you?” he said, ashamed to be so quickly conciliatory and trying to make his voice grate.

“No, Getaway—­not mad—­only I guess—­sad.”

She stopped before her rooming house.  It was as long and as lean and as brown as a witch, and, to the more fanciful, something even of the riding of a broom in the straddle of the doorway, with an empty flagpole jutting from it.  And then there was the cat, too—­not a black one with gold eyes, just one of the city’s myriad of mackerel ones, with chewed ear and a skillful crouch for the leap from ash to garbage can.