“Joyce is a saint,” said Simple. “She knows my heart is in the right place even if my pocketbook is empty. That girl knows I love her. But life ain’t all that long, that a girl so good should be stood up indefinite. Joyce says if I don’t marry her this year, skippy! She says she is tired of paying room rent by herself. Also if she stays Miss much longer, she will have missed the boat. Joyce says she is going to get on board some kind of boat this year even if it is a tug.

“I told her, ‘Baby, don’t put me in a class with no tug. I am a big-time excursion boat, myself. I hauls the finest only, that is why I am waiting now to take you on my deck.’

“‘When will your decks be clear?’ asks Joyce.

“‘When I have saved One Hundred,’ I said, ‘which will be when I have done without One Thousand glasses of beer.’”

“You have counted carefully,” I said.

“Which is why, daddy-o, I have give up drinking, also any other kind of sport which takes money. I even skipped seeing the Dodgers play this season, and only looked at Jackie on television, in order to prove to that woman that I will do a whole lot of not having what I want, to get what I want—which is her. Joyce is sweet, I mean! In my heart she is a queen! My desire, my fire, my honey—the only woman who ever made me save my money!”

“I am glad to see your mind made up,” I said.

“A man has to make his mind up,” said Simple, “to get a woman to make his bed down. You know, Joyce is not like a lot of these women around New York. She don’t have no truck for trash that don’t act right. Just this evening she was reading and it were a colored paper, and she asked me why it is that every time she looks in it they got on the society page the picture of some colored pimp or racketeer or low lady stuck up there as representative of society. That I do not understand myself.”

“I understand it,” I said. “The racketeer people and night-life folks are about the only ones in these days of high prices who have got the money to entertain lavishly.”

“Well, money or not,” said Simple, “Joyce says she do not see why they is got to be set up as examples for kids to imitate. She tried to make a issue out of it with me, even, when I told her that Sweet Beak Charlie was after all a nice guy, even if he did have an apartment on Sugar Hill, a house in Long Island, two Cadillacs, a wife and six other womens, and made his money out of numbers. Naturally, him and his wife is bound to go in society.”