MYRTLE: I said to him, Mr. Porter, I don’t think that you are playing fair and square with me.

CHICKEN: What was his answer to that one?

LOT: Myrtle!

MYRTLE: You seem to be taking advantage, I said, of the fact that you are my boss. You are taking liberties with me.

CHICKEN: Ah-hah.

MYRTLE: This was in the depression, before the war, and jobs was scarce as hen’s teeth, so you can imagine how much nerve it took to go to a boss and make a complaint like that!

CHICKEN: Ah-hah . . .

MYRTLE: Well, I did it, I made it. And if I had lost that job I might have starved, because my girlfriend, Gladys, was hard as a rock and if I had been not employed, do you think she would of bothered? No. She’d of told me the room was suddenly crowded! With two people in it.

CHICKEN: Ah-hah. You have learned the scoop.

MYRTLE: Well, this is what happened. He walked up to me and put his hands on my hips. Is this what you mean, he said? And he started to kiss me. I tried to walk one way and Charlie pushed me the other.

LOT: Myrtle!

MYRTLE: He kicked the office door shut and backed me up against a great big roller-top desk and he took me by force right there in that office of his. He was a man about forty with sandy red hair. Built like you, very good, but older and heavy! Like a, like a—red—bull . . . Give me—a little more—whiskey . . . I like to drink from a tin cup . . . Thanks!

LOT: Myrtle!

MYRTLE: It riles me to be hollered at!—more than anything else. I don’t know why I’m telling you this story, you couldn’t be interested in it.

CHICKEN: If I wasn’t int’rested in it, I wouldn’t listen. It passes time till we hear that dynamite blast at Mr. Sikes’. When we hear that dynamite blast, we’ll have to move to the roof.

MYRTLE: How would we get up there?

CHICKEN: There’s a ladder and a trap-door to the roof.

MYRTLE: And you’ll get me up there with you? Promise me you will.

CHICKEN: Go on with the story about how you lost your cherry.

MYRTLE: They say you lose your heart when you lose your cherry . . . I did. I loved that bull. I loved that big red bull of a hardhearted man. Some girls don’t like it at first, but me, I got to admit that right from the start I loved it.

CHICKEN: How about now? You still do?