But the girl did not laugh with him. Instead she looked troubled.
"Wouldn't you rather be a 'highbrow' too?" she asked, "and live up on Riverside Drive, right across the street from me?"
"I don't belong," said the mucker gruffly.
"Wouldn't you rather belong?" insisted the girl.
All his life Billy had looked with contempt upon the hated, pusillanimous highbrows, and now to be asked if he would not rather be one! It was unthinkable, and yet, strange to relate, he realized an odd longing to be like Theriere, and Billy Mallory; yes, in some respects like Divine, even. He wanted to be more like the men that the woman he loved knew best.
"It's too late fer me ever to belong, now," he said ruefully. "Yeh gotta be borned to it. Gee! Wouldn't I look funny in wite pants, an' one o' dem dinky, little 'Willie-off-de-yacht' lids?"
Even Barbara had to laugh at the picture the man's words raised to her imagination.
"I didn't mean that," she hastened to explain. "I didn't mean that you must necessarily dress like them; but BE like them--act like them--talk like them, as Mr. Theriere did, you know. He was a gentleman."
"An' I'm not," said Billy.
"Oh, I didn't mean THAT," the girl hastened to explain.
"Well, whether youse meant it or not, it's so," said the mucker. "I ain't no gent--I'm a mucker. I have your word for it, you know--yeh said so that time on de Halfmoon, an' I ain't fergot it; but youse was right--I am a mucker. I ain't never learned how to be anything else. I ain't never wanted to be anything else until today. Now, I'd like to be a gent; but it's too late."
"Won't you try?" asked the girl. "For my sake?"
"Go to't," returned the mucker cheerfully; "I'd even wear side whiskers fer youse."
"Horrors!" exclaimed Barbara Harding. "I couldn't look at you if you did."
"Well, then, tell me wot youse do want me to do."
Barbara discovered that her task was to be a difficult one if she were to accomplish it without wounding the man's feelings; but she determined to strike while the iron was hot and risk offending him--why she should be interested in the regeneration of Mr. Billy Byrne it never once occurred to her to ask herself. She hesitated a moment before speaking.
"One of the first things you must do, Mr. Byrne," she said, "is to learn to speak correctly. You mustn't say 'youse' for 'you,' or 'wot' for 'what'---you must try to talk as I talk. No one in the world speaks any language faultlessly, but there are certain more or less obvious irregularities of grammar and pronunciation that are particularly distasteful to people of refinement, and which are easy to guard against if one be careful."