Humoresque

White Goods

On a slope a white sprinkling of wood anemones lay spread like a patch of linen bleaching in the sun. From a valley a lark cut a swift diagonal upward with a coloratura burst of song. A stream slipped its ice and took up its murmur where it had left off. A truant squelched his toes in the warm mud and let it ooze luxuriantly over and between them.

A mole stirred in its hole, and because spring will find a way, even down in the bargain basement of the Titanic Store, which is far below the level of the mole, Sadie Barnet, who had never seen a wood anemone and never sniffed of thaw or the wet wild smell of violets, felt the blood rise in her veins like sap, and across the aisle behind the white-goods counter Max Meltzer writhed in his woolens, and Sadie Barnet, presiding over a bin of specially priced mill-ends out mid-aisle between the white goods and the muslin underwear, leaned toward him, and her smile was as vivid as her lips.

“Say, Max, guess why I think you’re like a rubber band.”

Classic Delphi was never more ready with ambiguous retort.

Behind a stack of Joy-of-the-Loom bed-sheets, Max Meltzer groped for oracular divination, and his heart-beats fluttered in his voice.

“Like a rubber band?”

“Yeh.”

“Give up.”

“Aw, give a guess.”

“Well, I don’t know, Miss Sadie, unless—unless it’s because I’m stuck on you.”

Do not, ascetic reader, gag at the unsocratic plane. True, Max Meltzer had neither the grain nor the leisure of a sophist, a capacity for tenses or an appreciation of Kant. He had never built a bridge, led a Bible class, or attempted the first inch of the five-foot bookshelf. But on a two-figure salary he subscribed an annual donation to a skin-and-cancer hospital, wore non-reversible collars, and maintained a smile that turned upward like the corners of a cycle moon. Remember, then, ascetic reader, that a rich man once kicked a leper; Kant’s own heart, that it might turn the world’s heart outward, burst of pain; and in the granite cañon of Wall Street, one smile in every three-score and ten turns upward.

Sadie Barnet met Max Meltzer’s cycle-moon smile with the blazing eyes of scorn, and her lips, quivering to a smile, met in a straight line that almost ironed out the curves.

“’Cause you’re stuck on me! That’s a swell guess. Gee! you’re as funny as a sob, you are.”

The words scuttered from her lips like sharp hailstones and she glanced at him sidewise over a hump of uplifted shoulder and down the length of one akimbo arm.

“’Cause you’re stuck on me! Huh!”

Max Meltzer leaned across a counter display of fringed breakfast napkins.

“Ain’t that a good reason, Miss Sadie? It’s a true one.”

“You’re one swell little guesser, you are not. You couldn’t get inside a riddle with a can-opener. ’Cause you’re stuck on me! Gee!”

“Well, I am.”

“I didn’t ask you why you was like a bottle of glue. I asked you why you was like a rubber band.”

“Aw, I give up, Miss Sadie.”

“’Cause you’re so stretchy, see? ’Cause you’re so stretchy you’ll yawn your arm off if you don’t watch it.”

Max Meltzer collapsed in an attitude of mock prostration against a stock-shelf.

“Gee! that must have been cracked before the first nut.”

“Smarty!”

Across the specially priced mill-ends she flashed the full line of her teeth, and with an intensity his features ill concealed he noted how sweet her throat as it arched.

“It’s the spring fever gets inside of me and makes me so stretchy, Miss Sadie. It’s a good thing trade is slow down here in the basement to-day, because it’s the same with me every year; the Saturday before spring-opening week I just get to feeling like all outdoors.”

“Wait till you see me with a new red-satin bow stuck on my last summer’s shape. Dee Dee’s got to lend me the price for two yards of three-inch red-satin ribbon for my spring opening.”

His breath rose in his throat.

“I bet you look swell in red, Miss Sadie. But a girl like you looks swell in anything.”

“Red’s my color. Dee Dee says my mamma was a gay one, too, when it came to color. Had to have a red bow pinned somewheres around all the months she was in bed and—and up to the very night she died. Gimme red every time. Dee Dee’s the one that’s always kicking against red; she says I got too flashy taste.”

“Say, if she keeps bossing and bossing at you, what do you keep on living with her for?”

“Wouldn’t you live with your own mother’s sister if she raised you from a kid? What am I going to do, put her in cold storage, now that her eyes are going back on her? Up in the ribbons she can’t hardly keep her colors graduated no more, that’s how blind she’s getting. Only yesterday a dame brought back some lavender ribbon and wiped up the whole department with Dee Dee for putting it over on her as blue. What am I going to do?”

“Honest, Miss Sadie, I didn’t know that she was your aunt and that her eyes was bad. I’ve seen you two together a lot and noticed her thick lenses, but I just didn’t think.”

“Well, now I’m telling you.”

“I just thought she was some old girl up in the ribbons you was living with for company. Honest, I didn’t know she had bad eyes. Gee!”

“No, they ain’t bad. Only she’s so blind she reads her paper upside down and gets sore if you tell her about it.”

“And me thinking she was nothing but a near-sighted old grouch with a name like a sparrow.”

Miss Barnet laughed with an upward trill.

“Dee Dee ain’t her real name. When I was a kid and she took me to raise, that’s the way I used to pronounce Aunt Edith. Gee! you don’t think Dee Dee was the name they sprinkled on her when they christened her, did you?”

Max Meltzer leaned to the breath of her laughter as if he would fill his lungs with it.

“Gee! but you’re a cute little lady when you laugh like that.”

“Say, and ain’t you the freshie! Just because you’re going to be promoted to buyer for your department won’t get your picture in the Sunday supplement. No white-goods buyer I know of ever had to build white marble libraries or present a bread-line to the city to get rid of his pin-money.”

“I bet you was a cute little black-eyed, red-cheeked little youngster, alrighty.”

“I wasn’t so worse. Like I tell Dee Dee, the way she’s held me down and indoors evenings, it’s a wonder a kid like me grew up with any pep at all.”

“Poor little lady!”

“It’s like Dee Dee says, though. I never was cut out for life behind the counter. Gee! I’d soak my pillow in gasolene every night in the week if it would make me dream I’m automobiling.”

“Poor little lady!”

“Say, ain’t it hot? With the Opening on Monday, they better get the fans working. Last year three girls keeled. Honest, sometimes I think I’d rather spend the summer under the daisies out on the hill than down here in this basement.”

“Don’t I wish I had an auto to take you spinning in to-night.”

“You ought to see the flier a friend of mine has got. A Mercury Six with a limousine top like a grand-opera box.”

“Your—your—friend?”

“Yes. He’s that slick-looking, little fat fellow that’s a cousin to Mamie Grant up in the ready-to-wears. He was down here talking to me the other day.”

“I seen him.”

“Gee! you ought to feel yourself in his Mercury Six. ‘Lemme die,’ I says to him the last time I was in it. ‘Just lemme close my eyes right in here and die happy,’ I says, cuddled up in the red-leather seat with a cornucopia of daffodils tickling my nose and a street-car full of strap-hangers riding along-side of us.”

“I—I guess if you got swell friends like that, a boat excursion down the river ’ain’t got much of a sound for you.”

“He says he’s got a launch in summer—”

“Honest, Miss Sadie, I—I just been trying for the better part of two weeks to ask permission if I could come and call on you some evening, Miss Sadie, but—”

“Whoops! ain’t he the daredevil!”

“The first boat of the season, Miss Sadie, a swell new one they call the White Gull, goes down to Coney to-night, and, it being real springtime, and you feeling kind of full of it, I thought maybe, it being the first boat of the season, maybe you would take a river ride this grand April night, Miss Sadie.”

Her glance slanted toward him, full of quirks.

“My aunt Dee Dee, Mr. Meltzer, she’s right strict with me. She don’t think I ought to keep company with any boys that don’t come to see me first at my house.”

“I know it, Miss Sadie; that’s the right way to do it, but I think I can get around her all right. Wasn’t she down here in the basement the day I first heard about my promotion, and didn’t she give me the glad hand and seem right friendly to me? I can get around her all right, Miss Sadie. I can always tell if a person likes me or not.”

“Anyways, if her eyes ain’t too bad, Mr. Meltzer, I got a date with my friend if his car is out of the shop from having the limousine top taken off. We—we’re going for a little spin.”

A quick red belied her insouciance and she made a little foray into the bin of mill-ends.

“Gee! if I’ve made three sales this livelong day I don’t know nothing about two of them.”

Max Meltzer met her dancing gaze, pinioning it with his own quiet eyes.

“You’re right to pick out the lucky fellows who can buy a good time. A little girl like you ought to have every enjoyment there is. If I could give it to you, do you think I would let the other fellows beat me to it? The best ain’t none too good for a little lady like you.”

“Aw, Mr. Meltzer!” Her bosom filled and waned. “Aw, Mr. Meltzer!”

“I mean it.”

An electric bell grilled through his words. Miss Barnet sprang reflexly from the harness of an eight-hour day.

“Aw, looka, and I wanted to sneak up before closing and get Dee Dee to snip me two yards of red satin, and she won’t cut an inch after the bell. Ain’t that luck for you? Ain’t that luck?”

Her lips drew to a pout.

“Lemme get it for you, Miss Sadie. I know a girl up in the ribbons—”

“No, no, Mr. Meltzer. I—I got to charge it to Dee Dee, and, anyways, she gets mad like anything if I keep her waiting. I gotta go. ‘Night, Mr. Meltzer! ‘Night!”

She was off through the maze of the emptying store, in the very act of pinning on her little hat with its jaunty imitation fur pompon, and he breathed in as she passed, as if of the perfume of her personality.

At the ribbon counter on the main floor the last of a streamlet of outgoing women detached herself from the file as Miss Barnet ascended the staircase.

“Hurry up, Sadie.”

“Dee Dee! How’d you girls up here get on your duds so soon? I thought maybe if I’d hurry upstairs you—you’d find time to cut me a two-yard piece of three-inch red satin for my hat, Dee Dee—to-morrow being Sunday. Two yards, Dee Dee, and that’ll make two-sixty-nine I owe you. Aw, Dee Dee, it won’t take a minute, to-morrow Sunday and all! Aw, Dee Dee!”

Miss Barnet slid ingratiating fingers into the curve of the older woman’s arm; her voice was smooth as salve.

“Aw, Dee Dee, who ever heard of wearing fur on a hat in April? I gotta stick a red bow on my last summer’s sailor, Dee Dee.”

Miss Edith Worte stiffened so that the muscles sprang out in the crook of her arm and the cords in her long, yellowing neck. Years had dried on her face, leaving ravages, and through her high-power spectacles her pale eyes might have been staring through film and straining to see.

“Please, Dee Dee!”

Miss Barnet held backward, a little singsong note of appeal running through her voice.

Miss Worte jerked forward toward the open door. April dusk, the color of cold dish-water, showed through it. Dusk in the city comes sadly, crowding into narrow streets and riddled with an immediate quick-shot of electric bulbs.

“‘Ain’t you got no sense a-tall? ‘Ain’t you got no sense in that curly head of yourn but ruination notions?”

“Aw, Dee Dee!”

They were in the flood tide which bursts through the dam at six o’clock like a human torrent flooding the streets, then spreading, thinning, and finally seeping into homes, hall bedrooms, and Harlem flats.

Miss Edith Worte turned her sparse face toward the down-town tide and against a light wind that tasted of rain and napped her skirts around her thin legs.

“Watch out, Dee Dee! Step down; there’s a curb.”

“I don’t need you. It’s lots you care if I go blind on the spot.”

“Dee Dee!”

“God! if I didn’t have nothing to worry me but red ribbons! I told the doctor to-day while he was putting the drops in my eyes, that if he’d let me go blind I—I—”

“Now, now, Dee Dee! Ain’t you seeing better these last few days?”

“If you had heard what the doctor told me to-day when he put the drops in my eyes you’d have something to think about besides red ribbon, alrighty.”

“I forgot, Dee Dee, to-day was your eye-doctor day. He’s always scarin’ you up. Just don’t pay no attention. I forgot it was your day.”

“Sure you forgot. But you won’t forget if I wake up alone in the dark some day.”

“Dee Dee!”

“You won’t forget then. You won’t forget to nag me even then for duds to go automobiling with fly men that can’t bring you no good.”

“Dee Dee, I ’ain’t been but one night this week. I been saving up all my nights for—for to-night.”

“To-night. Say, I can’t keep you from going to the devil on skates if—”

“It’s only the second time this week, Dee Dee, and I—I promised. He’ll have the limousine top off to-night—and feel, it is just like summer. A girl’s gotta have a little something once in a while.”

“What do I gotta have? What do I gotta have but slave and work?”

“It’s different with you, Dee Dee. You’re older even than my mamma was, and didn’t you say when you and her was girls together there wasn’t a livelier two sisters? Now didn’t you, Dee Dee?”

“In a respectable way, yes. But there wasn’t the oily-mouthed, bald-headed divorced man alive, with little rat eyes and ugly lips, who could have took me or your mamma out auto-riding before or after dark. We was working-girls, too, but there wasn’t a man didn’t take off his hat to us, even if he was bald-headed and it was twenty below zero.”

“Aw!”

“Yes, ‘aw’! You keep running around with the kind of men that don’t look at a girl unless she’s served up with rum-sauce and see where it lands you. Just keep running if you want to, but my money don’t buy you no red ribbons to help to drive you to the devil!”

“The way you keep fussing at me, when I don’t even go to dances like the other girls! I—sometimes I just wish I was dead. The way I got to watch the clock like it was a taximeter the whole time I’m out anywheres. It’s the limit. Even Max Meltzer gimme the laugh to-day.”

“You’d never hear me say watch the clock if you’d keep company with a boy like Max Meltzer. A straight, clean boy with honest intentions by a girl lookin’ right out of his face. You let a boy like Max Meltzer begin to keep steady with you and see what I say. You don’t see no yellow streak in his face; he’s as white as the goods he sells.”

“I know. I know. You think now because he’s going to be made buyer for the white goods in September he’s the whole show. Gee! nowadays that ain’t so muchy much for a fellow to be.”

“No, I think the kind of fellows that fresh Mamie Grant gets you acquainted with are muchy much. I’m strong for the old rat-eyed sports like Jerry Beck, that ’ain’t got a honest thought in his head. I bet he gives you the creeps, too, only you’re the kind of a girl, God help you, that’s so crazy for luxury you could forget the devil had horns if he hid ’em under a automobile cap.”

“Sure I am. I ’ain’t seen nothing but slaving and drudging and pinching all my life, while other girls are strutting the Avenue in their furs and sleeping mornings as long as they want under eider-down quilts. Sure, when a man like Jerry Beck comes along with a carriage-check instead of a Subway-ticket I can thaw up to him like a water-ice, and I ain’t ashamed of it, neither.”

They turned into a narrow aisle of street lined with unbroken rows of steep, narrow-faced houses. Miss Worte withdrew her arm sharply and plunged ahead, her lips wry and on the verge of tremoling.

“When a girl gets twenty, like you, it ain’t none of my put-in no more. Only I hope to God your mother up there is witness that if ever a woman slaved to keep a girl straight and done her duty by her it was me. That man ’ain’t got no good intentions by—”

“Oh, ain’t you—ain’t you a mean-thinking thing, ain’t you? What kind of a girl do you think I am? If he didn’t have the right intentions by me do you think—”

“Oh, I guess he’ll marry you if he can’t get you no other way. Them kind always do if they can’t help themselves. A divorced old guy like him, with a couple of kids and his mean little eyes, knows he’s got to pay up if he wants a young girl like you. Oh, I—Ouch—oh—oh!”

“Dee Dee, take my arm. That was only an ashcan you bumped into. It’s the drops he puts in your eyes makes ’em so bad to-night, I guess. Go on, take my arm, Dee Dee. Here we are home. Lemme lead you up-stairs. It’s nothing but the drops, Dee Dee.”

They turned in and up and through a foggy length of long hallway. Spring had not entered here. At the top of a second flight of stairs a slavey sat back on her heels and twisted a dribble of gray water from her cloth into her bucket. At the last and third landing an empty coal-scuttle stood just outside a door as if nosing for entrance.

“Watch out, Dee Dee, the scuttle. Lemme go in first. Gee! it’s cold indoors and warm out, ain’t it? Wait till I light up. There!”

“Lemme alone. I can see.”

An immemorial federation of landladies has combined against Hestia to preserve the musty traditions of the furnished room. Love in a cottage is fostered by subdivision promoters and practised by commuters on a five-hundred-dollars-down, monthly-payment basis. Marble halls have been celebrated in song, but the furnished room we have with us always at three cents per agate line.

You with your feet on your library fender, stupefied with contentment and your soles scorching, your heart is not black; it is only fat. How can it know the lean formality of the furnished room? Your little stenographer, who must wear a smile and fluted collars on eight dollars a week, knows it; the book agent at your door, who earns eighteen cents on each Life of Lincoln, knows it. Chambermaids know it when they knock thrice and only the faint and nauseous fumes of escaping gas answer them through the plugged keyhole. Coroners know it.

Sadie Barnet and Edith Worte knew it, too, and put out a hand here and there to allay it. A comforting spread of gay chintz covered the sag in their white iron bed; a photograph or two stuck upright between the dresser mirror and its frame, and tacked full flare against the wall was a Japanese fan, autographed many times over with the gay personnel of the Titanic Store’s annual picnic.

“Gee! Dee Dee, six-twenty already! I got to hurry. Unhook me while I sew in this ruching.”

“Going for supper?”

“Yeh. He invited me. This is cottage-pudding night; tell old lady Finch when I ain’t home for supper you got two desserts coming to you.”

“I don’t want no supper.”

“Aw, now, Dee Dee!”

Miss Worte dropped her dark cape from her shoulders, hung it with her hat on a door peg, and sat heavily on the edge of the bed.

“God! my feet!”

“Soak ’em.”

Miss Barnet peeled off her shirt-waist. Her bosom, strong and flat as a boy’s, rose white from her cheaply dainty under-bodice; at her shoulders the flesh began to deepen, and her arms were round and full of curves.

“Here, Dee Dee, I’m so nervous when I hurry. You sew in this ruche; you got time before the supper-bell. See, right along the edge like that.”

Miss Worte aimed for the eye of the needle, moistening the end of the thread with her tongue and her fluttering fingers close to her eyes.

“God! I—I just ’ain’t got the eyes no more. I can’t see, Sadie; I can’t find the needle.”

Sadie Barnet paused in the act of brushing out the cloud of her dark hair, and with a strong young gesture ran the thread through the needle, knotting its end with a quirk of thumb and forefinger.

“It’s the drops, Dee Dee, and this gaslight, all blurry from the curling-iron in the flame, makes you see bad.”

Miss Worte nodded and closed her eyes as if she would press back the tears and let them drip inward.

“Yeh, I know. I know.”

“Sure! Here, lemme do it, Dee Dee. I won’t stay out late, dearie, if your eyes are bad. We’re only going out for a little spin.”

Miss Worte lay back on the chintz bedspread and turned her face to the wall.

“I should worry if you come home or if you don’t—all the comfort you are to me.”

“You say that to me many more times and you watch and see what I do; you watch and see.”

“The sooner the better.”

In the act of fluting the soft ruche about her neck, so that her fresh little face rose like a bud from its calyx, Miss Barnet turned to the full length of back which faced her from the bed.

“That’s just the way I feel about it—the sooner the better.”

“Then we think alike.”

“You ’ain’t been such a holy saint to me that I got to pay up to you for it all my life.”

“That’s the thanks I get.”

“You only raised me because you had to. I been working for my own living ever since I was so little I had to He to the inspectors about my age.”

“Except what you begged out of my wages.”

“I been as much to you as you been to me and—and I don’t have to stand this no longer. Sure I can get out and—and the sooner the better. I’m sick of getting down on my knees to you every time I wanna squeeze a little good time out of life. I’m tired paying up for the few dollars you gimme out of your envelop. If I had any sense I—I wouldn’t never take it from you, nohow, the way you throw it up to me all the time. The sooner the better is what I say, too; the sooner the better.”

“That’s the thanks I get; that’s the—”

“Aw, I know all that line of talk by heart, so you don’t need to ram it down me. You gotta quit insinuating about my ways to me. I’m as straight as you are and—”

“You—you—take off that ivory-hand breast-pin; that ain’t yours.”

“Sure I’ll take it off, and this ruche you gimme the money to buy, and this red bracelet you gimme, and—and every old thing you ever gimme. Sure I’ll take ’em all off. I wish I could take off these gray-top shoes you paid a dollar toward, and I would, too, if I didn’t have to go barefoot. It’s the last time I borrow from—”

“Aw, you commenced that line of talk when you was ten.”

“I mean it.”

“Well, if you do, take off them gloves that I bought for myself and you begged right off my hands. Just take ’em off and go barehanded with your little-headed friend; maybe he can buy—”

“You—Oh, I—I wish I was dead! I—I’ll go barehanded to a snowball feast rather than wear your duds. There’s your old gloves—there!”

Tears were streaming and leaving their ravages on the smooth surface of her cheeks.

“I just wish I—I was dead.”

“Aw, no, you don’t! There’s him now, with a horn on his auto that makes a noise like the devil yelling! There’s your little rat-eyed, low-lived fellow, now. You don’t wish you was dead now, do you? Go to him and his two divorces and his little roundhead. That’s where you belong; that’s where girls on the road to the devil belong—with them kind. There he is now, waiting to ride you to the devil. He don’t need to honk-honk so loud; he knows you’re ready and waiting for him.”

Miss Barnet fastened on her little hat with fingers that fumbled.

“Gimme—the key.”

“Aw, no, you don’t. When you come home tonight you knock; no more tiptoe, night-key business like last time. I knew you was lying to me about the clock.”

“You gimme that key. I don’t want you to have to get up, with all your kicking, to open the door for me. You gimme the key.”

“If you wanna get in this room when you come home to-night, you knock like any self-respecting girl ain’t afraid to do.”

“You—oh—you!” With a shivering intake of breath Miss Barnet flung wide the door, slamming it after her until the windows and the blue-glass vase on the mantelpiece and Miss Worte, stretched full length on the bed, shivered.

Two flights down she flung open the front door. There came from the curb the bleat of a siren, wild for speed.

Stars had come out, a fine powdering of them, and the moist evening atmosphere was sweet, even heavy. She stood for a moment in the embrasure of the door, scenting.

“Do I need my heavy coat, Jerry?”

The dim figure in the tonneau, with his arms flung out their length across the back of the seat, moved from the center to the side.

“No, you don’t. Hurry up! I’ll keep you warm if you need a coat. Climb in here right next to me, Peachy. Gimme that robe from the front there, George.

“Now didn’t I say I was going to keep you warm? Quit your squirming, Touchy. I won’t bite. Ready, George. Up to the Palisade Inn, and let out some miles there.”

“Gee! Jerry, you got the limousine top off. Ain’t this swell for summer?”

Mr. Jerome Beck settled back in the roomy embrasure of the seat and exhaled loudly, his shoulder and shoe touching hers.

She settled herself out of their range.

“Now, now, snuggle up a little, Peachy.”

She shifted back to her first position.

“That’s better.”

“Ain’t it a swell night?”

“Now we’re comfy—eh?”

They were nosing through a snarl of traffic and over streets wet and slimy with thaw. Men with overcoats flung over their arms side-stepped the snout of the car. Delicatessen and candy-shop doors stood wide open. Children shrilled in the grim shadows of thousand-tenant tenement-houses.

“Well, Peachy, how are you? Peachy is just the name for you, eh? ’Cause I’d like to take a bite right out of you—eh, Peachy? How are you?”

“Fine and—and dandy.”

“Look at me.”

“Aw!”

“Look at me, I say, you pretty little peach, with them devilish black eyes of yours and them lips that’s got a cherry on ’em.”

She met his gaze with an uncertain smile trembling on her lips.

“Honest, you’re the limit.”

“What’s your eyes red for?”

“They—they ain’t.”

“Cryin’?”

“Like fun.”

“You know what I’d do if I thought you’d been crying? I’d just kiss them tears right away.”

“Yes, you would not.”

“Little devil!”

“Quit calling me that.” But she colored as if his tribute had been a sheath of lilies.

They veered a corner sharply, skidding on the wet asphalt and all but grazing the rear wheels of a recreant taxicab.

“Gad, George! you black devil you, why don’t you watch out what you’re doing?”

“But, suh, I—”

“None of your black back-talk.”

“Jerry!” She was shivering, and a veil of tears formed over her hot, mortified eyes. “Gee! what are you made of? You seen he couldn’t help it when that taxi turned into us so sudden.”

He relaxed against her. “Aw, did I scare the little Peachy? That’s the way they gotta be handled. I ain’t ready by a long shot to let a black devil spill my brains.”

“‘Shh-h. He couldn’t—”

“Sure he could, if he watched. He’s a bargain I picked up cheap, anyways, ’cause he’s lame and can’t hold down heavy work. And bargains don’t always pay. But I’ll break his black back for him if—Aw, now, now, did I scare the little peach? Gee! I couldn’t do nothing but kill you with kindness if you was driving for me. I’d just let you run me right off this road into the Hudson Ocean if you was driving for me.”

They were out toward the frayed edge of the city, where great stretches of sign-plastered vacant lots began to yawn between isolated patches of buildings and the river ran close enough alongside of them to reflect their leftward lights. She smiled, but as if her lips were bruised.

“It ain’t none of my put-in, but he couldn’t help it, and I hate for you to yell at anybody like that, Jerry.”

“Aw, aw, did I scare the little Peachy? Watch me show the little Tootsie how nice I can be when I want to—Aw—aw!”

“Quit.”

She blinked back the ever-recurring tears.

“All tired out, too; all tired out. Wait till you see what I’m going to buy you to-night. A great big beefsteak with mushrooms as big as dollars and piping-hot German fried potatoes and onions. M-m-m-m! And more bubbles than you can wink your eye at. Aw—aw, such poor cold little hands, and no gloves for such cold little hands! Here, lemme warm ’em. Wouldn’t I just love to wrap a little Peachy like you up in a great big fur coat and put them little cold hands in a great big muff and hang some great big headlight earrings in them little bittsie ears. Wouldn’t I, though. M-m-m-m! Poor cold little hands!”

Her wraith of a smile dissolved in a spurt of hot tears which flowed over her words.

“Gee! Ain’t I the nut to—to cry? I—I’ll be all right in a minute.”

“I knew when I seen them red eyes the little Peachy wasn’t up to snuff, and her cute little devilishlike ways. What’s hurting you, Tootsie? Been bounced? You should worry. I’m going to steal you out of that cellar, anyways. Been bounced?”

“N-no.”

“The old hag ’ain’t been making it hot for you, has she?”

“Sh-she—”

“Gad! that old hag gets my fur up. I had a mother-in-law once tried them tricks on me till I learned her they wouldn’t work. But the old hag of yourn—”

“It’s her eyes; the doctor must have scared her up again to-day. When she gets scared like that about ’em she acts up so, honest, sometimes I—I just wish I was dead. She don’t think a girl oughtta have no life.”

“Forget it. Just you wait. She’s going to wake up some morning soon and find a little surprise party for herself. I know just how to handle an old bird like her.”

“Sometimes she’s just so good to me, and then again, when she gets sore like to-night, and with her nagging and fussing at me, I don’t care if she is my aunt, I just hate her.”

“We’re going to give her a little surprise party.” Beneath the lap robe his hand slid toward hers. She could feel the movement of the arm that directed it and her own shrank away.

“But ain’t I the limit, Jerry, airing my troubles to you, like you was a policeman.”

“Now, now—”

“Quit! Leggo my hand.”

They were spinning noiselessly along a road that curved for the moment away from the river into the velvet shadows of trees. He leaned forward suddenly, enveloping her.

“I got it. Why don’t you lemme kidnap you, kiddo?”

“What—”

“Lemme kidnap you to-night and give the old hag the surprise of her life when she wakes up and finds you stolen. I’m some little kidnapper when it comes to kidnapping, I am, kiddo. Say, wouldn’t I like to take you riding all wrapped up in a fur coat with nothing but your cute little face sticking out.”

“Aw, you’re just fooling me.”

“Fooling! Lemme prove it, to-night. Lemme kidnap you this very night. I—”

She withdrew stiff-backed against his embrace.

“Is—is that what you mean by—by kidnapping me?”

“Sure. There ain’t nothing I’d rather do. Are you on, Peaches? A sensible little queen like you knows which side her bread is buttered on. There ain’t nothing I want more than to see you all bundled up in a fur coat with—headlights in your little bittsie pink ears.”

She sprang the width of the seat from him.

“You—What kind of a girl do you think I am? O God! What kind of a girl does he think I am? Take me home—take me—What kind of a girl do you think I am?”

He leaned toward her with a quick readjustment of tone.

“Just what I said, Peachy. What I meant was I’d marry you to-night if we could get a license. I’d just kidnap you to-night if—if we could get one.”

“You—you didn’t mean that.”

“Sure I did, Peachy. Say, with a little girl of my own I ain’t one of them guys that you think I am. Ain’t you ashamed of yourself, Peachy—now ain’t you?”

The color flowed back into her face and her lips parted.

“Jerry—Only a girl like me’s got to be careful—that was all I meant, Jerry. Jerry!”

He scooped her in his short arms and kissed her lips, with her small face crumpled up against his shoulder, and she lay quiescent enough in his embrace. Wind sang in her ears as they rushed swiftly and surely along the oiled road, but the two small fists she pressed against his coat lapels did not relax.

“Aw, now, Peachy, you mustn’t treat a fellow cold no more! Ain’t I going to marry you? Ain’t I going to set you up right in my house out in Newton Heights? Ain’t I going to give you a swell ten-room house? Ain’t you going to live right in the house with my girl, and ain’t she going to have you for a little stepmother?”

“Jerry, the—the little girl. I wonder if she wants—”

“Sure she does. Her mother gets her every other month. I’d let her go for good if you don’t want her, except it would do her mother too much good. The courts give her to me every other month and I’ll have her down to the last minute of the last hour or bust.”

“Jerry!”

“That’s what I gotta keep up the house out there for. The court says I gotta give her a home, and that’s why I want a little queen like you in it. Gad! Won’t her mother throw a red-headed fit when she sees the little queen I picked! Gad!”

“Oh, Jerry, her your first wife and all! Won’t it seem funny my going in her house and—and living with her kid.”

“Funny nothing. Cloonan won’t think it’s funny when I tell her she’s finished running my house for me. Funny nothing. To-morrow’s Sunday and I’m going to take you out in the afternoon and show you the place, and Monday, instead of going to your bargain bin, we’re going down for a license, and you kiss the old hag good-by for me, too. Eh, how’s that for one day’s work?”

“Gee! and—and—Monday the spring opening and me not there! Jerry, I—I can’t get over me being a lady in my own house. Me! Me that hates ugliness and ugly clothes and ugly living so. Me that hates street-cars and always even hated boat excursions ’cause they was poor folks’ pleasures. Me a lady in my own house. Oh, Jerry!”

She quivered in his arms and he kissed her again with his moist lips pressed flat against hers.

“Ten rooms, Peachy—that’s the way I do things.”

They were curving up a gravel way, and through the lacy foliage of spring lights gleamed, and there came the remoter strains of syncopated music.

She sat up and brushed back her hair.

“Is this the place?”

“Right-o! Now for that steak smothered in mushrooms, and, gad! I could manage a sweetbread salad on the side if you asked me right hard.”

They drew up in the flood-light of the entrance.

“‘Ain’t I told you not to open the door for me, George? I don’t need no black hand reaching back here to turn the handle for me. That don’t make up for bad driving. Black hands off.”

“Jerry!”

They alighted with an uncramping and unbending of limbs.

“How’d some Lynnhavens taste to you for a starter, Peachy?”

“Fine, whatever they are.”

A liveried attendant bowed them up the steps.

A woman in blue velvet, her white arms bare to the shoulder and stars in her hair, paused in the doorway to drop her cloak. Her heavy perfume drifted out to meet them.

Sadie Barnet’s clutch of her companion’s arm quickened and her thoughts ran forward.

“Jerry—gee! wouldn’t I look swell in—in a dress like that? Gee! Jerry, stars and all!”

The cords in the muscles of his arm rose under her fingers.

“Them ain’t one-two-three-six to the duds I’m going to hang on you. I know her; she’s an old-timer. Them duds ain’t one-two-three-six.”

“Gee—Jerry!”

In the heart of a silence as deep as a bottomless pool, with the black hours that tiptoe on the heels of midnight shrouding her like a nun’s wimple, limbs trembling and her hands reluctant, Sadie Barnet knocked lightly at her door, once, twice, thrice, and between each rap her heart beat with twice its tempo against her breast.

Then her stealthy hand turned the white china knob and released it so that it sprang backward with a click.

“Who’s that?”

“Me, Dee Dee.”

Her voice was swathed in a whisper.

She could hear the plong of the bedspring, the patter of bare feet across the floor; feel the slight aperture of the opening door. She oozed through the slit.

“All right, Dee Dee.”

“God! I—I must have been sound asleep. What time is it?”

“It isn’t late, Dee Dee.”

“Light the gas.”

“I—I can undress in the dark.”

“Light the gas.”

“I—”

“Light it, I say.”

“It’s lit, Dee Dee.”

The figure in the center of the room, in her high-necked, long-sleeved nightdress, her sparse hair drawn with unpleasant tension from her brow, her pale eyes wide, moved forward a step, one bare foot, calloused even across the instep, extended.

“Lit?”

“Dee Dee, what’s the matter?”

“Gimme—my glasses.”

She took them from Miss Barnet’s trembling ringers and curved them about her ears.

“Quit your nonsense now and light the gas. I ain’t in no humor for foolin’. Quit waving that little spark in front of me. Light the gas. I ain’t going to look at the clock. I’m done worrying about your carryings-on. I’m done. Light the gas, Sadie, there’s a good girl. Light the gas.”

“Dee Dee! My God! Dee Dee, I—I tell you it’s lit—big.”

“There’s a good girl, Sadie. Don’t fool your old aunt.”

“See, dearie, I ain’t fooling. See, the gas-jet here beside the dresser. Look—I can’t turn it no higher. Hear it sing and splutter. You ain’t awake good yet, Dee Dee.”

Silence—the ear-splitting silence that all in its brief moment is crammed with years and years upon years. A cold gray wash seemed suddenly to flow over Miss Worte’s face.

“Put my finger next to the gas flame. You—you’re lying to me to—to fool your old aunt. Lemme feel my finger get burnt.”

They moved, these two, across the floor, their blanched faces straining ahead. With the sudden sting of heat finally across her palm, reddening it, Miss Worte flung wide her arms and her head backward, and her voice tore out without restraint.

“God! God! God!” And she fell to trembling so that her knees gave way under her and she crouched on the floor with her face bared to the ceiling, rocking herself back and forth, beating her fists against her flat breasts.

“God! God! God!”

“Dee Dee!—Dee Dee! my darling! my darling!”

“O God! O God! O God!”

“Dee Dee darling, it ain’t nothing! A little too much strain, that’s all. ‘Shh-h-h! Lemme bathe them. ‘Shh-h-h, my darling. Oh, my God! darling! ‘Shh-h-h!”

“Lemme go! Lemme go! He told me to-day it would come like this! Only he didn’t say how soon. Not how soon. I’m done for, I tell you! I’m done! Kill me, Sadie; if you love me, kill me! He told me and I wouldn’t believe it! Kill me, girl, and put me out of it! I can’t breathe in the dark! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t live in the dark with my eyes open! Kill me, girl, and put me out of it—kill me! Kill me!”

“Dee Dee, my darling, ain’t I right here with you? Didn’t you always say, darling, when it came you—you’d face it?”

Like St. Cecilia, who could not die, she crouched, and the curve of her back rose and fell.

“O God! Oh—”

“Dee Dee darling, try not to holler out so! Maybe it ain’t for—for good. Aw, darling, keep your head down here next to me! Feel how close I am, Dee Dee, right here next to you. ‘Shh-h-h! O God! Dee Dee darling, you’ll kill yourself going on like that! Don’t pull at your hair, darling—don’t! Oh, my God, don’t!”

“I’m done! Kill me! Kill me! Don’t make me live in the dark with my eyes open—don’t! There’s a good girl, Sadie. Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!”

From the room adjoining came a rattling at the barred door between.

“Cut it, in there! This ain’t no barroom. Go tell your D. T.’s to a policeman.”

They crouched closer and trembling.

“‘Shh-h-h! Dee Dee, darling, try to be easy and not raise the house—try!”

Miss Worte lay back exhausted against Miss Barnet’s engulfing arms. Her passion ebbed suddenly and her words came scant, incoherent, and full of breath.

“No use. No use. He told me to-day he wouldn’t operate. He told me. No, no, all the colors so pale—even the reds—so pale! Lavender and blue I—I just couldn’t tell. I couldn’t. So pale. Two yards she brought back next day, kicking at—Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

‘“Shh-h-h, darling! Don’t take on so! Wait till morning and we’ll get new drops from him. ‘Shh-h-h! Maybe it’s only strain.”

“I know. I’m in the dark for good, Sadie. Oh, my God! I’m in the dark!”

Except that her face was withered, she was like Iphigenia praying for death.

“Lemme die! Lemme die!”

“‘Shh-h-h—darling—That’s it, rest quiet.”

Suddenly Miss Worte flung up one arm about Sadie Barnet’s neck, pressing her head downward until their faces touched.

“Dee Dee darling, you—you hurt.”

“You won’t never leave me, Sadie, like you said you would? You won’t leave me alone in the dark, Sadie?”

“No, no, my darling; you know I won’t, never, never.”

“You’ll keep me with you always, promise me that, Sadie. Promise me that on the curl of your mother’s hair you wear in your locket. Promise me, little Sadie, you won’t leave your aunt Dee Dee alone in the dark. My poor little girl, don’t leave me alone in the dark. I can’t see; Sadie, I can’t see no more. Promise me, Sadie, promise me, promise me!”

From Sadie Barnet’s heart, weakening her like loss of blood, flowed her tears. She kissed the heart of Edith Worte where it beat like a clock beneath the high-necked nightdress; she made of her bosom a pillow of mercy and drew the head up to its warmth.

“I—I promise, Dee Dee, on her curl of hair. Sure I promise. Always will I keep you with me, darling, always, always, so help me, always.”

Along the road to Newton Heights Spring and her firstlings crept out tenderly. Even close up to the rim of the oiled highway itself, an occasional colony of wood violets dared to show their heads for the brief moment before they suffocated. The threat of rain still lay on the air, but the Sunday rank and file of motors threw back tops, lowered windshields, and turned shining noses toward the greening fields.

In the red-leather tonneau, with her little face wind-blown and bared to the kiss in the air, Sadie Barnet turned to her companion and peered under the visor of his checked cap and up into his small inset eyes.

“Is—is that the house up on the hill there, Jerry?”

“Not yet. It’s right around the next bend.”

“Gee! My—my hands are like ice, I—I’m that nervous.”

“Lemme feel.”

“No.”

“That’s a swell way to treat a fellow who’s promised to marry you.”

“You—you must excuse me to-day, Jerry. Honest, without a wink of sleep last night—you must excuse me to-day. I—I’m so upset with poor Dee Dee, and on top of that so nervous about—your little girl and the house and everything. And, Dee Dee—when I think of Dee Dee.”

“Don’t think, Peachy; that’s the way to get around that.”

“I—I can’t help it. You ought to seen her at the doctor’s this morning, how—how the poor thing lost her nerve when he told her that there—there wasn’t no hope.”

“Aw, now, cut the sob stuff, Peachy! You can’t help it. Nobody can, that’s the trouble. Say, what kind of a little queen will they think you are if I bring you home all soppy with crying?”

“I ought not to have come, Jerry. I’m no kind of company to-day, only all of a sudden she’s got so—so soft with me and she made me come while she—she tried to take a nap. Poor old Dee Dee!”

“Yeh, and poor old devil. Maybe she’s just getting what’s due to her.”

“Jerry!”

“Sure, I believe every one of us gets what’s coming to us.”

“She—”

“Here we are, Tootsie. See, Peachy, that’s the house I bought her and her mother, and they was kicking at it before the plaster was dry.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“That’s a concrete front. Neat, ain’t it? That’s a mosaic-floor porch, too, I built on a year after her and her mother vamoosed.”

“It’s a beau-tiful house, Jerry.”

“You’re the land of a kid that knows how to appreciate a home when she gets it. But her with her she-devil of a mother, they no sooner got in than they began to side with each other against me—her and her old mother trying to learn me how to run my own shebang.”

“Where—”

“Gad! they’re living in a dirty Harlem flat now and tryin’ to put it over on me that they’re better off in it. Bah! if I had to double up on alimony, I wouldn’t give her a smell at this house, not a smell.”

“Say, but ain’t it pretty, Jerry, right up over the river, and country all around, and right over there in back the street-cars for the city when you want them?”

“This is going to be your street-car, Peachy, a six-cylinder one.”

She colored like a wild rose.

“Oh, Jerry, I—I keep forgetting.”

“By Gad! it’s a good thing I’m going to give up my city rooms and come out here to watch my p’s and q’s. Gosh darn her neck! I told her to quit cluttering up that side-yard turf with her gosh darn little flower-beds! Gosh darn her neck! There never was a servant worth her hide.”

“Jerry, why, they’re beautiful! They just look beautiful, those pansies, and is that the little girl sitting up there on the porch steps? Is—is that Maisie?”

They drew to a stop before the box-shaped ornate house, its rough concrete front pretentiously inlaid over the doors and windows with a design of pebbles stuck like dates on a cake, and perched primly on the topmost step of the square veranda the inert figure of a small girl.

“Aw, ain’t she cute?”

Miss Barnet sprang lightly to the sidewalk, and beside her Mr. Jerome Beck flecked the dust of travel from the bay of his waistcoat, shaking his trousers knees into place.

“This has got your Twenty-third Street dump beat a mile, and then some, ’ain’t it, Peachy?”

“Jerry, call her here, the little girl. You tell her who—who I am. Tell her gently, Jerry, and—and how good I’m going to be to her and—Aw, ain’t I the silly, though, to feel so trembly?”

The child on the step regarded their approach with unsmiling eyes, nor did she move except to draw aside her dark stuff skirts and close her knees until they touched.

“Hello there! Moping again, eh? Get up! Didn’t I tell you not to let me catch you not out playing or helping Cloonan around? Say howdy to this lady. She’s coming out here to live. Come here and say howdy to her.”

The child shrank to the newel-post, her narrow little face overtaken with an agony of shyness.

“Cat got your tongue? Say howdy. Quit breathing through your mouth like a fish. Say howdy, that’s a good girl.”

“Don’t force her, Jerry. She’s bashful. Ain’t you, dearie? Ain’t you, Maisie?”

“Moping, you mean. If it was her month in the dirty Harlem flat she’d be spry enough. She knows what I mean whan I say that, and she knows she better cut out this pouting. Quit breathing through your mouth or I’ll stick a cork in it.”

“Aw, Jerry, she can’t help that!”

“Cat got your tongue? Where’s Cloonan?”

The child’s little face quivered and screwed, each feature drawing itself into position for tears. Her eyes disappeared, her nostrils distended, her mouth opened to a quivering rectangle, and she fell into silent weeping.

“Aw, Jerry—you—you scared her! Come here, darling; come here to me, Maisie; come, dearie.”

But the child slid past the extended arms, down the wooden steps, and around a corner of the house, her arm held up across her eyes.

“Aw, Jerry, honest, you can be awful mean!”

“I’ll get that out of her or know the reason why. They’ve poisoned her against me, that’s about how it is in a nutshell. I’ll get that pouting to be in that dirty Harlem hole with her mother and grandmother out of her or know the reason why.”

“She—”

“Look, this is the front hall. Guess this ’ain’t got that sty in Twenty-third Street beat some. Look! How do you like it? This way to the parlor and dining-room.”

Sadie Barnet smiled through the shadows in her eyes.

“Jerry! Say, ain’t this beau-tiful! A upright piano and gold, chairs and—Why, Jerry! why, Jerry!”

“And look in here, the dining-room. Her and her mother shopped three weeks to get this oak set, and see this fancy cabinet full of china. Slick, ain’t it?”

Her fingers curled in a soft, clutch around her throat as if her breath came too fast.

“Jerry, it—it’s just grand.”

He marshaled her in all the pride of ownership.

“Look, butler’s pantry, exposed plumbing.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“Kitchen.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“Here, Cloonan. I told you I was going to bring somebody out to take hold and sit on you and your bills, didn’t I? This lady’s coming out here tomorrow, bag and baggage. Hand over your account-book to her and I bet she does better with it. See that you fix us up in honeymoon style, too. Bag and baggage we’re coming. Savvy?”

The figure beside the ill-kept stove, bowl in lap and paring potatoes with the long fleshless hands of a bird, raised a still more fleshless face.

“Howdy!”

“Cloonan’s been running this shebang for two years now, Peachy, and there ain’t nothing much she can’t learn you about my ways. They ain’t hard. Look! Porcelain-lined sink. It’s got Twenty-third Street beat some, ’ain’t it?”

“Yes, Jerry.”

“Fix us a beefsteak supper, Cloonan, and lemme weigh up them groceries I sent out and lemme see your books afterward. Come, Peachy, here, up these stairs. This is the second floor. Pretty neat, ain’t it? Her and her mother shopped three more weeks on this oak bed-set. Some little move out here from Twenty-third Street for a little rooming-house queen like you, eh? Neat little bedroom, eh, Peachy? Eh?”

His face was close to her and claret red with an expression she did not dare to face.

“And what’s this next room here, Jerry? Ain’t it sweet and quiet-looking! Spare room? Ain’t it pretty with them little white curtains? Quit, quit, Jerry! You mustn’t—you mustn’t.”

She broke from his embrace, confusion muddling her movements.

“Is this the—the spare room?”

“It is, now. It used to be the old woman’s till I laid down on the mother-in-law game and squealed. Yeh, I used to have a little mother-in-law in our house that was some mother-in-law. Believe me, she makes that old devil of yourn look like a prize angel.”

“I—This’ll be just the room for Dee Dee, Jerry, where she can feel the morning sun and hear the street-cars over there when she gets lonesome. She ought to have the sunniest room, because it’s something she can feel without seeing—poor thing. This will be a swell room for poor old blind Dee Dee, won’t it, Jerry? Won’t it, Jerry dear?”

“Cut the comedy, Peachy. There’s a neat free ward waiting for her just the other direction from the city than Newton Heights. Cut the comedy, Peachy.”

“Jerry, I—I gotta have her with me. I—Now that she—she’s in the dark. She couldn’t stand an institution, Jerry, she—she just couldn’t.”

“That’s what they all say, but they get over it. I know a—”

“She couldn’t, Jerry. She ’ain’t had much in her life, but she’s always had a roof over her head that wasn’t charity, and she always said, Jerry, that she couldn’t never stand a—a institution. She can take any other room you say, Jerry. Maybe there’s a little one up-stairs in the third story we could fix up comfy for her; but she’s in the dark now, Jerry, and, my God! Jerry, she just couldn’t stand an institution!”

He patted her shoulder and drew her arm through his.

“You lemme take care of that. She don’t need to know nothing about it. We’ll tell her we’re sending her for a visit to the country for a while. After the second day she’ll be as snug as a bug in a rug. They’re good to ’em in those places; good as gold.”

“No, no, Jerry! No, no! I gotta have her with me! She raised me from a kid and—and she couldn’t stand it, Jerry! I gotta have her, I gotta! I want her!”

His mouth sagged downward suddenly and on an oblique.

“Say, somebody must have given you a few lessons in nagging, yourself. Them’s the lines she used to recite to me about her she-devil of a mother, too. Gad! she used to hang on her mother’s apron-strings like she was tied.”

“Jerry, I—”

“Come, Peachy, don’t get me sore. Come, let’s talk about to-morrow. We gotta get the license first and—”

“Jerry, I—Promise me I can have her with me first. I—Just a little yes is all I want—Jerry dear—just a little yes.”

A frown gathered in a triple furrow on his brow.

“Now, kiddo, you got to cut that with me, and cut it quick. If there’s two things I can’t stand it’s nagging and pouting. Cloonan can tell you what pouting can drive me to. I’ll beat it out of that girl of mine before she’s through with me, and I won’t stand it from no one else. Now cut it, Peachy, that’s a nice girl.”

He paced the carpeted space of floor between the dresser and bed, his mouth still on the oblique.

“Now cut it, Peachy, I said, and cut it quick.”

She stood palpitating beside the window, her eyes flashing to his face and fastening there.

“God! I—I wanna go.”

“Where?”

Her glance flashed past him out of the window and across the patch of rear lawn. A street-car bobbed across the country; she followed it with eager eyes.

“I wanna go.”

He advanced, conciliatory. “Aw, now, Peachy, a row just the day before we are married. You don’t want to start out making me train you just like you was a little kid. If you was a little girl I could beat your little ways out of you, but I wanna be on the level with you and show you how nice I can be. All the things I’m going to give you, all—”

“Quit, you! I wanna go! I wanna go!”

“You can go to hell, for my part. I’m going to get a steak inside of me before we budge. Quit your fooling. See, you nearly got me sore there. Come, the car won’t be back for us until six. Come, Peachy, come.”

She was past him and panting down the stairs, out across the patch of rear lawn, and toward the bobbing street-car, the streamer of ribbon at her throat flying backward over her shoulder.

In the bargain basement of the Titanic Store the first day of the spring opening dragged to its close. In a meadow beside a round pond a tree dripped apple blossoms, each so frail a thing that it fluttered out and away, too light to anchor.

In careless similitude the bargain basement of the Titanic Store resuscitated from its storerooms, and from spring openings long gone by, dusty garlands of cotton May blossoms, festooning them between the great white supporting pillars of the basement and intertwining them.

Over the white-goods counter and over Sunday, as it were, a papier-mâché pergola of green lattice-work and more cotton-back May blossoms had sprung up as if the great god Wotan had built it with a word. Cascades of summer linens, the apple green and the butter yellow, flowed from counters and improvised tables. Sadie Barnet’s own mid-aisle bin had blossomed into a sacrificial sale of lawn remnants, and toward the close of the day her stock lay low, depleted.

Max Meltzer leaned out of his bower, and how muted his voice, as if it came from an inner throat that only spoke when the heart bade it.

“Little one, them remnants went like hot cakes, didn’t they?”

“Hot cakes! Well, I guess. You’d have thought there was a mill-end sale on postage stamps.”

“And if you don’t look all tired out! If you just don’t!”

The ready tears swam in her voice.

“It’s—it’s been awful—me away from her all day like this. But, anyways, I got news for her when I go home to-night about her five weeks’ benefit money. Old Criggs was grand. He’s going to send the committee to see her. Anyways, that’s some good news for her.”

“I just can’t get her out of my mind, neither. Seems like I—I just can see her poor blind face all the time.”

“M-me, too.”

“They say the girls up in the ribbons been crying all day. She was no love-bird, but they say she wasn’t bad underneath.”

“God knows she—she wasn’t.”

“That’s the way with some folks; they’re hard on top, but everybody knows hard-shell crabs have got sweeter meat than soft.”

“Nobody knows that she was a rough diamond better than me. I got sore at her sometimes, but I—I know she was always there when I—I needed her, alrighty.”

“Now, now, little girl, don’t cry! You’re all worn out.”

“She—she was always there to stand by me in—in a pinch.”

“Honest, Miss Sadie, you look just like a pretty little ghost. What you need is some spring air, girlie, some spring air for a tonic. Wouldn’t I just love to take you all by your little self down the river to-night on one of them new Coney boats, where we could be—right quiet. Say, wouldn’t I?”

“No—no!”

“I wanna talk to you, Miss Sadie. Can’t you guess? I wanna get you all by yourself and talk to you right in your little ear.”

‘“Shh-h-h! You mustn’t talk like that.”

“That’s the only way I have of trying to tell you how—how I feel, Miss Sadie—dearie.”

‘“Shh-h-h!”

“When I call you that it means—well, you know, dearie, you know. That’s why I wanna take you to-night, dearie, all by your little self and—”

“No, no, Mr. Meltzer! I can’t leave her alone like that. I promised I would never leave her alone in the dark if—if I could help it.”

“Ain’t I the dub? Sure you can’t leave her. We gotta stick by her now, dearie. ‘Ain’t we? ‘Ain’t we?”

A red seepage of blood surged across his face and under his hair. Beneath his little hedge of mustache his lips quivered as if at their own daring.

“We gotta stick by her, dearie.”

All her senses swam, nor could she control the fluttering of her hands.

“Oh—Mr. Meltzer—Max!”

“What you and poor old Dee Dee need is some of this spring air. Gee! wouldn’t I love to take you—and her down the river to-night on one of them new Coney boats? Gee! would I? Just you and—and her.”

“Max—oh, Max dearie!”

“HEADS”

By the great order of things which decreed that about the time Herod, brother to no man, died, Jesus, brother to all men, should be born; and that Rabelais, moral jester, should see light the very year that orthodox Louis XI passed on, by that same metaphysical scheme reduced to its lowliest, Essman’s drop-picture machine, patent applied for, was completed the identical year that, for Rudolph Pelz, the rainy-day skirt slumped from a novelty to a commodity.

At a very low tide in the affairs of the Novelty Rainy Day Skirt Company, Canal Street, that year of our Lord, 1898, when letter-head stationery was about to be rewritten and the I-haven’t-seen-you-since-last-century jocosity was about to be born, Rudolph Pelz closed his workaday by ushering out Mr. Emil Hahn, locking his front door after his full force of two women machine-stitchers, and opening a rear door upon his young manhood’s estate. A modest-enough holding in the eyes of you or me as beholders; but for the past week not an evening upon opening that door but what tears rushed to his throat, which he laughed through, for shame of them.

On a bed, obviously dragged from its shadowy corner to a place beside the single window, and propped up so that her hair, so slickly banding her head in two plaits, sprang out against the coarsely white pillows, Mrs. Rosa Sopinsky Pelz, on an evening when the air rose sultry, stale, and even garbage-laden from a cat-and-can-infested courtyard, flashed her quick smile toward that opening door, her week-old infant suckling at her breast.

“You ought to seen, Roody; she laughed! Puckered herself up into the cutest little grin when mamma left just now.”

Mr. Pelz wound his way through an overcrowded huddle of furniture that was gloomily, uglily utilitarian. A sideboard spread in pressed glass; a chest of drawers piled high with rough-dry family wash; a coal-range, and the smell and sound of simmering. A garland of garlic, caught up like smilax, and another of drying red peppers. On a shelf above the sink, cluttered there with all the pitiful unprivacy of poverty, a layout, to recite which will label me with the nigritude of the realist, but which is actually the nigritude of reality—a dish of brown-and-white blobs of soap; a coffee-cup with a great jag in its lip; a bottle of dried beans; a rubber nipple floating in a saucer of water; a glass tumbler containing one inverted tooth-brush; a medicine-bottle glued down in a dark-brown pool of its own substance; a propped-up bit of mirror, jagged of edge; a piece of comb; a rhinestone breastpin; a bunion-plaster; a fork; spoon; a sprouting onion. Yet all of this somehow lit by a fall of very coarse, very white, and very freshly starched lace curtains portière-fashion from the door, looped back in great curves from the single window, and even skirting stiffly and cleanly the bureau-front and bed-edge.

“How is my little mammela?” said Mr. Pelz, leaning over the bed to kiss Mrs. Pelz on the shining plaits, the light-tan column of throat and the little fist pressed so deeply into her bosom.

“Just ought to seen, Roody—honest, she laughed and nearly jerked off mamma’s sheidel!”1

“Red head!” he said, stroking down at the warm “bulge of blanket, so snugly enclosed in the crotch of mothering arm.

“It’s redder than yours already, Roody.”

“She’s sure a grand little thing cuddled up there, ain’t it so, mammela?”

She reached up to pat his blue shirt-sleeve.

“There’s some herring on the table mamma brought over, and some raw meat and onions. That’s some borshtsh on the stove Etta carried all the way over from Hester Street for your supper.”

“And what for the little mammela?”

“I’m fed up, Roody. Mamma closed the store at five to run over with some of that milk-shake like Doctor Aarons said. He sent his little son Isadore over with the prescription. Like I said to mamma, she should let the Canal Street Kosher Sausage Company do double the business from five until six while she closes shop to carry her daughter a milk-shake! Like I was used to it from home!”

“When my girl gets to be a little mammela, the best shouldn’t be none too good.”

She continued to stroke up at his sleeve and occasionally on up into his uneven shock of red hair.

“You miss me in the shop, Roody?”

“You should just see once how that Ruby Grabenheiner sits at your machine! She does one-half your work not one-half so good.”

“I’ll be back next week Monday.”

He patted her quickly. “No! No! A mammela’s place is with her baby.”

“Roody, you make me laugh. I should sit at home now since we got a new mouth to feed? That would be a fine come-off!”

“Who do you think was just in, Rosie? Emil Hahn.”

“Sol is going to make for me, Roody, one of those little packing-case cribs like he built for Etta up in the pants-factory, so when the machine works it rocks, too. Did—did the check from Solomon & Glauber come in on the last mail, Roody?”

“Now, Rosie, you mustn’t worry yourself about such—”

“What you looking so funny for, Roody?”

“I was starting to tell you, Rosie—Hahn was just in and—”

“Roody, don’t change the subject on me always. You looked funny. Is it something wrong with Solomon & Glau—”

“If you don’t take the cake, Rosie! Now, why should I look funny? ‘Funny,’ she says I look, I’m hungry. I smell Etta’s borshtsh.”

She half raised herself, the pulling lips of the child drawing up the little head from the cove of arm.

“Rosie, you mustn’t lift up that way!”

“Roody, I can read you like a book! Solomon & Glauber have countermanded, too.”

“Now, Rosie, wouldn’t that keep until—”

“They have!”

“Well, if you got to know it, Rosie, they’re shipping back the consignment.”

“Roody!”

“What you going to do about it? Give you my word never seen the like. It’s like the rainy-day skirt had died overnight. All of a sudden from a novelty, I find myself with such a commodity that every manufacturer in the business is making them up for himself.”

“You seen it first, though, Roody. Nobody can take it away from you that you seen first how the rainy-day skirt and its shortness would be such a success with the women.”

“‘Seen it first,’ she says! Say, what good does it do me if I didn’t see far enough? I pick for myself such a success that I crowd myself out of business.”

“It’s a dirty shame! A big firm like Solomon & Glauber should not be allowed to—”

“Say, if it wouldn’t be Solomon & Glauber, it would be Funk & Hausman or any other firm. The rainy-day skirt has slipped out of my hands, Rosie, to the big fellows. We must realize that for ourselves. That’s the trouble when you don’t deal in a patented product. What’s the little fellows like myself to do against a firm like Solomon & Glauber? Start something?”

“Three countermands in a week, and no orders coming in!”

“Say, it don’t tickle my ribs no more than yours.”

“Roody, maybe it’s the worst thing ever happened to us you wouldn’t listen to mamma and be satisfied with being chief cutter at Lipschuts’.”

“Shame on you, Rosie! You want your daughter to grow up with a pants-cutter all her life for a father? You want I should die in somebody else’s harness. Maybe I didn’t hit it right away, but I say yet, if a fellow’s got the eyes and the nerve to see ahead a little with his imagination—”

“‘Imagination.’ He talks like a story-book.”

“Now—now, take Hahn, Rosie—there’s a fellow’s got imagination—but not enough. I know it makes you mad when I talk on his picture-machine, but you take it from me—there’s a fellow with a good thing under his very nose, but he—he ’ain’t quite got the eyes to see ahead.”

“Say, for such a good thing like Emil Hahn’s picture-machine, where his wife had to work in my own mother’s sausage-store, I can’t make myself excited.”

“He ’ain’t quite got the eyes to see, Rosie, the big idea in it. He’s afraid of life, instead of making it so that life should be afraid of him. Ten dollars cheaper I can buy that machine to-day than last week. A song for it, I tell you.”

“Ninety dollars to me is no cheap song, Roody.”

“The people got to be amused the same as they got to be fed. A man will pay for his amusements quicker than he will pay his butcher’s or his doctor’s bill. It’s a cash business, Rosie. All you do with such a machine like Hahn’s is get it well placed, drop your penny in the slot, and see one picture after another as big as life. I remember back in the old country, the years before we came over, when I was yet a youngster—”

“You bet Hahn never put his good money in that machine. I got it from Birdie Hahn herself. For a bad debt he took it over along with two feather beds and—”

“One after another pictures as big as life, Rosie, like real people moving. One of them, I give you my word, it’s grand! A woman it shows all wrapped tight around in white, on a sofa covered over with such a spotted—what you call—leopard-skin.”

“To me that has a sound, Roody, not to be proud of—”

“A living picture, with such neck and arms and—”

“That’s enough, Roody! That’s enough! I’m ashamed even for your daughter here!”

“Such a machine, maybe some day two or three, set up in a place like Coney Island or, for a beginning, in Pleasure Arcade, is an immense idea, Rosie. Until an invention like this, nine-tenths of the people couldn’t afford the theyater. The drop-picture machine takes care of them nine-tenths.”

“Theyaters are no place for the poor.”

“That’s where you’re wrong—they need it the most. I don’t want to get you worked up, Rosie, while you ain’t strong, but every day that we wait we’re letting a great idea slip through our fingers. If I don’t buy that machine off Emil Hahn, somebody else will see in it what I see. Then all our lives we will have something to reproach ourselves with.”

Mrs. Pelz let slide her hand beneath the pillow, eyes closing and her face seeming to whiten.

“Ninety dollars! Twenty dollars less than every cent we got saved in the world. It ain’t right we should gamble with it, Roody. Not now.”

“Why not now, Rosie? It’s all the more reason. Is it worth maybe a little gamble our Bleema should grow up like the best? I got bigger plans for her and her little mammela than such a back room all their lives. In a few years, maybe three rooms for ourselves in one of them newfangled apartment-houses up on Second Avenue with turn-on hot water—”

“That’s right—you’ll have her riding in a horseless carriage next!”

“I tell you, it’s a big idea!”

“I wish we had ten cents for every big idea you’ve been struck with.”

“That’s just why, Rosie, I’m going to hit one right.”

Mrs. Pelz withdrew then the slow hand from beneath the pillow and a small handkerchief with a small wad knotted into it.

“Nearly every—cent—in—the world, Roody, that we’ve got. Saved nearly penny by penny. Our Bleema—it’s a sin—our—our—”

“Sin nothing!”

“Our week-old little girl—it—”

“Nothing ventured in life, Rosie, nothing squeezed out of it. Don’t put it back! Look, the baby herself wants it! Papa’s little Bleema! Look! She’s trying to lift herself. Ain’t that remarkable, Rosie—look at that child lifting for that handkerchief!”

“Our little baby girl! If it was for ourselves alone, all right, maybe, take a chance—but for—”

Suddenly Mr. Pelz clapped his thigh. “I got it! I got it! Well let the little Bleema decide it for us. How’s that? She should decide it for us if we take a gamble on her daddy’s big idea! Here—I put a five-cents piece in her little hand and see which way she drops it. The little mammela will say which way it is to be—heads or tails. How’s that, Rosie—the baby should decide it for us?”

“Roody—we mustn’t!”

“Heads or tails, Rosie?”

“I—I—”

“Quick!”

“H-heads!”

“Quick now, papa’s baby, open up little fist!”

“Roody, not so rough! She can’t hold that big nickel.”

“That’s just what I want—she should let it fall.”

“Roody, Roody, I hope it’s tails.”

The coin rolled to the bed-edge, bounced off to the floor, rolled to the zinc edge.

Immediately after, on all-fours, his face screwed up for scrutiny and the back of his neck hotly ridden with crimson, Mr. Pelz leaned after.

“Roody—what?”

“Heads!”

Where Riverside Drive reaches its rococo climax of the twelve-thousand-dollar-a-year and twelve-story-high apartment-house de luxe and duplex, and six baths divided by fourteen rooms is equal to solid-marble comfort, Elsinore Court, the neurotic Prince of Denmark and Controversy done in gilt mosaics all over the foyer, juts above the sky-line, and from the convex, rather pop-eyed windows of its top story, bulges high and wide of view over the city.

From one of these windows, looking north, Rudolph Pelz, by the holding-aside of a dead weight of pink brocade and filet lace, could gaze upon a sweep of Hudson River that flowed majestically between the great flank of the city and the brobdingnagian Palisades.

After a day when he had unerringly directed the great swinging crane of this or that gigantic transaction it had a laving effect upon him—this view of sure and fluent tide that ran so perpetually into infinitude.

Yet for Mr. Pelz to attempt to articulate into words this porcelain-thin pillar of emotions was to shatter it into brittle bits.

“Say, Rosie, ain’t that a view for you? That’s how it is with life—a river that rises with getting born and flows into death, and the in-between is life and—and—”

“Roody, will you please hurry for sup—dinner? Do you want Feist to arrive with you not yet dressed?”

Mr. Pelz turned then into an interior that was as pink and as silk as the inside of a bud—satin walls with side brackets softly simulating candles; a Canet bed, piled with a careful riot of sheerest and roundest of pillows; that long suit of the interior decorator, the chaise-longue; the four French engravings in their gilt frames; the latest original Josephine’s secrétaire; the shine of a white adjoining bathroom. Before a door-impaneled mirror, Mrs. Pelz, in a black-lace gown that was gracious to her rotundity.

“Just look! I’m all dressed already.”

Mr. Pelz advanced to her, his clasp closing over each of her bare arms, smile and gaze lifting.

“Rosie, you’ve got them all beat! Guess why I wish I was your diamond necklace.”

“Roody, it’s nearly seven. Don’t make me ashamed for Feist.”

“Guess!”

“All right, then, I guess.”

“So I could always be round your neck.”

His hand flew immediately to the lay of gems at her throat, a small flush rising.

“Roody, you hear me—hurry! Stop it, I tell you! You pinch.” But she was warmly pink now, the shake of her head setting the heavy-carat gems in her ears waggling.

Time, probably emulating destiny, had worked kindly here; had brought to Mrs. Pelz the soft, dove-like maturity of her little swell of bosom; the white, even creamy shoulders ever so slightly too plump between the blades; the still black hair polished and waved into expensive permanence. Out of years that had first veered and finally taken course under his unquestionable captaincy, Rudolph Pelz, with some of their storm and stress written in deep brackets round his mouth, the red hair just beginning to pale and thin, and a certain roundness of back enhancing his squattiness, had come snugly and simply into harbor. Only the high cheek-bones and bony jaw-line and the rather inconveniently low voice, which, however, had the timbre of an ormolu clock in the chiming, indicating his peculiar and covert power to dominate as dynamically as ungrammatically a board of directors reckoning in millions across the mahogany.

“Shall I call in Sato to help you dress, Roody?”

“Please—no! Just to have him in the room with his yellowness and tiptoes makes me nervous like a cat.”

“I got your shirt and studs laid out myself.”

He pinched her cheek again. “Rosie Posy!”

“You had a hard day, Roody? You look tired.”

“I don’t like the battle of Waterloo in the ‘Saint Elba’ picture.”

“Roody, that scene it took such a fortune to build into the shape of the letter A?”

“It looks like what is it. Fake! The way it reads in that French Revolution by that fellow Carlyle they gave me to read and the way it looks in the picture is the difference of black from white. For fifty thousand dollars more or less on a four-hundred-thousand-dollar picture I don’t have a fake Waterloo.”

“I should say not, Roody, when you’re famous for your water scenes in all your big pictures! In ‘The Lure of Silk’ it’s the scenes on the water they went craziest over.”

“I’ve already got the passage engaged for next week to shoot the company over to France. That windmill scene on Long Island looks as much like the windmill north of Fleuris, where Napoleon could see the Blucher troops from, as I look like a windmill scene. ‘Sol,’ I says, ‘it looks just like what it is—a piece of pasteboard out of the storehouse set up on a rock. Eat those feet of film, Sol,’ I says to him, ‘plant ’em, drown ’em—anything you like with ’em. That kind of fake stuff won’t make ‘Saint Elba’ the greatest picture ever released, and every picture turned out from these studios has got to be just that.’ I wish you could have heard, Rosie, in the projection-room, quiet like a pin after I came out with it.”

“Fifty thousand dollars, Roody?”

“Yes. ‘Fifty thousand dollars,’ begins Sol with me, too. ‘Fifty thousand—one hundred thousand—two!’ I said. ‘It would make no difference. If we can’t fake the kind of battle-plain that wouldn’t make Napoleon turn over in his grave, we cross the ocean for the real thing.’ ‘Fifty thousand dollars,’ Sol keeps saying—you know how he cries with his voice. ‘Fifty thousand dollars your grandmother!’ I hollered. ‘For a few dollars more or less I should make a Rudolph Pelz picture something I’m ashamed of.’ Am I right, Rosie? Am I right?”

“I should say so, Roody, for a few dollars you should not belittle yourself.”

“Not if your old man knows it, by golly! and I think he does.”

“Hurry now, Roody; you know how Bleema likes it you should be dressed.”

“Believe me, if Feist had his choice he wouldn’t be dressed, neither. Full dress for grandma and all of us to look at each other in! When there’s company, it’s bad enough, but for Feist and a few servants, hanged if I see it!”

“Does it hurt, Roody, to give the child a little pleasure? Anyway, she’s right—people like us should get dressed up for sup—dinner. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t bring Lester Spencer back for dinner from automobiling.”

“He leaves to-night at ten with the company for Pennsylvania and the Horseshoe Bend picture. Anyways, I don’t see where it comes in that for a fellow who draws his salary off of me I have to dress. I got to say it for him, though, give the devil his due, he does a good piece of work where Sol succeeds in getting him off center-stage in his scene with Wellington.”

“Lester is a good actor. Madame Coutilly, to-day, when I had my manicure, just raved over him and Norma Beautiful in ‘The Lure of Silk.’”

“He’ll be a screen proposition some day if we can chain down some of his conceit. Only, where such friendships with him and Bleema comes in, I don’t see. I don’t like it.”

“Say, the child likes to run around with celebrities. Why shouldn’t it give her pleasure over the other girls from Miss Samuels’s school to be seen out once in a while with Lester Spencer, their favorite, or Norma Beautiful? ‘America’s Darlings,’ I see this week’s Screen Magazine calls ’em. It’s natural the child should enjoy it.”’

“Let her enjoy; only, where it comes in I should have to sit across from him at supper three times this week, I don’t see. Out of the studio, me and Spencer don’t talk the same language. To-night, him and Feist would mix like oil and water.”

“Does Feist know yet, Roody, you closed the deal on the Grismer estate?”

“Sure! I says to him to-day: ‘Feist, with us for next-door neighbors of your country estate, together we own nearly half of Long Island.’ Am I right?”

“Like I says last night in mamma’s room to Etta and Sol, ‘I was used to thirty-four rooms and nineteen baths from home yet!’ Poor mamma—how she laughed! Just like before her stroke.”

“Nothing, Rosie, not one hundred rooms and fifty baths—nothing I can ever do for you is one-tenth that you deserve.”

“And nothing, Roody, that I can do for you is one-hundredth what you deserve.”

“I sometimes wonder, Rosie, if, with all we got, there isn’t maybe some little happiness I’ve overlooked for you.”

She lifted herself by his coat lapels, kissing him. “Such a question!”

“So many times it comes up in the scenarios and the picture-plots, Rosie, how money don’t always bring happiness.”

“It wouldn’t, Roody—not a penny’s worth to me without you and Bleema. But with you, Roody, no matter how happy I feel, it seems to me I can’t ever feel happy enough for what we have got. Why, a woman just couldn’t—why, I—I always say about you, Roody, only yesterday to my own sister-in-law, ‘Etta,’ I says, ‘it’s hard for me to think of anything new to wish for.’ Just take last week, for instance, I wished it that, right after the big check you gave for the Armenian sufferers, you should give that extra ten thousand in mamma’s name to the Belgian sufferers. Done! Thursday, when I seen that gray roadster I liked so much for Bleema, this afternoon she’s out riding in it. It is a wonder I got a wish for anything left in me.”

“To have you talk like this, Rosie, is the highest of all my successes.”

“If—if there’s one real wish I got now, Roody, it is only for our Bleema. We got a young lady, honey; we got to put on our thinking-cap.”

“‘Young lady’—all of a sudden she decides we’ve got! Young baby, you better say.”

“A graduate this month from Miss Samuels’s Central Park School he calls a baby!”

“Let me see—how old is—”

“He don’t know his own child’s age! Well, how many years back is it since we were in rainy-day skirts?”

“My God! Ten—fourteen—eighteen! Eighteen years! Our little Bleema! It seems yesterday, Rosie, I was learning her to walk along Grand Street.”

“You haven’t noticed, Roody, David Feist?”

“‘Noticed’?”

“Say, you may be a smart man, Rudolph Pelz—everybody tells me you are—but they should know once on the Picture Rialto how dumb as a father you are. ‘Noticed?’ he asks. All right then—if you need a brick house—noticed that David Feist hates your daughter and ’ain’t got eyes for her and don’t try every excuse to get invited here for sup—dinner.”

“You mean, Rosie—”

“Of course I mean! It’s pitiful how he follows her everywhere with his eyes. In the box last night at the opera you was too asleep to see it, but all evening Etta was nudging me how he nearly ate up our Bleema just with looks.”

“You women with your nonsense!”

“I guess, Rudolph, it would be a bad thing. Our daughter and a young man smart enough to make himself from a celluloid collar-cutter to a millionaire five times over on a little thing like inventing a newfangled film-substance should tie up with the only child of Rudolph Pelz, the picture king.”

“I give you my word, Rosie, such talk makes me sick.”

“You’d hate it, wouldn’t you? A prince like David Feist.”

“People don’t talk such things till they happen. If our daughter could have the King of England and didn’t want him, I’d say she should not marry the King of England. I want my girl home by me yet, anyway, for many a long day. She should be playing with her dolls instead of her mother and aunt Etta filling her up with ideas. Don’t think I’m so stuck, neither, on how she runs around with my film stars.”

“Honest, Roody, the way you’re so strict with that child it’s a shame! The girl has got to have her pleasure.”

“Well, if she’s got to have her pleasure, she should have it with young men like Feist and not with—”

“There! Didn’t I tell you so? Didn’t I?”

“Say, I don’t deny if I got some day to have a son-in-law, my first choice for him would be Feist.”

“Roody, the two estates together in one!”

“I’m surprised at you, Rosie—honest, I’m surprised. Such talk!”

Mrs. Pelz took a pinch of his each cheek, tiptoeing to kiss him squarely on the lips.

“Go get dressed,” she said, “and I’ll wait for you.”

“Rosie Posy,” he said, clucking into his cheek with his tongue and moving away through the pink-shaded twilight.

At the door to the whitely glittering bathroom she called to him again, softly; he turning.

“What’ll you bet, Roody, that I get my biggest wish as soon as I got the gray roadster and the Belgian check?”

“Women’s nonsense!” said Mr. Pelz, his voice suddenly lost in the violent plunge of water into porcelain.

In a drawing-room faithful to Dunlap Brothers’ exorbitant interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, a veritable forest of wrought-iron candle-trees burned dimly into a scene of Pinturicchio table, tapestry-surmounted wedding-chest, brave and hideous with pastiglia work, the inevitable camp-chair of Savonarola, an Umbrian-walnut chair with lyre-shaped front, bust of Dante Alighieri in Florentine cap and ear-muffs, a Sienese mirror of the soul, sixteenth-century suit of cap-à-pie armor on gold-and-black plinth, Venetian credence with wrought-iron locks. The voiceless and invoiced immobility of the museum here, as if only the red-plush railing, the cords from across chairs, and the “Do Not Sit” warnings to the footsore had been removed.

Against a chair cruel to the back with a carved coat of arms of the Lombardi family Mr. David Feist leaned lightly and wisely. If his correct-enough patent pumps ever so slightly escaped the floor, his span of shoulders left hardly an inch to be desired. There was a peninsula of rather too closely shaved but thick black hair jutted well down Mr. Feist’s brow, forming what might have been bald but were merely hairless inlets on either side. Behind pince-nez his eyes sparkled in points not unlike the lenses themselves. Honed to a swift, aquiline boniness of profile which cut into the shadows, there was something swiftly vigorous about even his repose.

Incongruous enough on the Pinturicchio table, and as if she had dared to walk where mere moderns feared to tread, a polychrome framed picture of Miss Bleema Pelz, tulle-clouded, piquant profile flung charmingly to the northwest, and one bare shoulder prettily defiled with a long screw-curl, lit, as it were, into the careful gloom.

Deliberately in range of that photograph, and so beatific of gaze that it was as if his sense were soaked in its loveliness, Mr. Feist smiled, and, smiling, reddened. Enter then Mrs. Pelz, hitting softly into white taffetas beneath the black lace; Mr. Pelz, wide, white and boiled of shirt-front.

“Good evening, Mr. Feist! It’s a shame the way we kept you waiting.”

“Not at all, Mrs. Pelz—a pleasure. Hello! how’s my friend, the picture king?”

“Rotten,” said Mr. Pelz, amiably, shaking hands with a great riding-up of cuff, and seating himself astride a Florentine bench and the leather-embossed arms of the Strozzi family.

“Roody, what a way to sit!”

“‘What a way to sit,’ she tells me. I’d like to see a fellow sit any way in this room without making a monkey of himself. Am I right, Feist? The Eyetalians maybe didn’t know no better, but I should have to suffer, too, when for four-seventy-nine I can buy myself at Tracy’s the finest kind of a rocking-chair that fits me.”

“Roody!”

“Say, Feist agrees with me; only, he don’t know you well enough yet to let on. I notice that with all his Louis-this and Louis-that rooms in his own house, up in his own room it is a good old Uncle Sam’s cot and a patent rocker.”

“You’ve got a gorgeous room here just the same, Pelz.”

“Gorgeous for a funeral.”

“Every collector in the country knows that table. I had my eye on it for my music-room once myself when it was shown at Dunlap’s.”

“Dunlap’s are a grand firm of decorators, Mr. Feist. I’m having them do Grismer, too.”

“Well, Feist, how does it feel to have us for neighbors?”

“Immense, Pelz!”

“Like I said to my husband, between us the way the estates adjoin, we got a monopoly on Long Island—ain’t it so?”

“And believe me, Mrs. Pelz, you’ll never regret the buy. The finest pleasure my money brought me yet is that view of my little bedroom I took you up to, Pelz.”

“Wonderful!”

“I’ve got an outlook there, Mrs. Pelz, is a paradise to see. You can have all my forty-two rooms and two garages if you’ll leave me my little top room with its miles of beautiful greenness, and—and so—so much beauty that—that it gets you by the throat. I—don’t express it the way I see it, but—”

“I should say so, Mr. Feist! Out of every one of our thirty-four rooms and eighteen baths you can see a regular oil-painting.”

Mr. Pelz leaned over, tongue in cheek and, at the screwing noise again, poking Mr. Feist in the region of the fifth rib.

“She said to me up-stairs just now, Feist, ‘Like we was used to it from home?’ Eh? C-c-c-cluck! Eighteen baths a day! I know the time when one every Saturday night was stuck up.”

“Roody, honest, you’re awful!”

“Say, me and Feist speak the same language. We ain’t entertaining a lot of motion-picture stars to-night.”

“I want Mr. Feist to come over some night to sup—dinner when we have a few of them over. We’re great friends, Mr. Feist, with Norma Beautiful and Allan Hunt and Lester Spencer and all that crowd. We entertain them a good deal. My daughter is quite chums with them all. Elsie Love sleeps here some nights. Honest, Mr. Feist, you never saw a more unassuming girl for her salary.”

“Yes, especially is she unassuming when she spoils ninety feet of film yesterday in a row with Spencer over who should have one-half inch nearer to the center of the picture.”

“My husband, Mr. Feist, has got no patience with temperament.”

“Honey, a little supper wouldn’t hurt.”

“I’ll send and see if Bleema is ready yet. She’s been out, taking Lester Spencer in her new runabout her papa bought her. I wish you could see, Mr. Feist, the way the traffic policemen smile after that girl the way she handles a car. If I do say it, she’s a picture.”

“If you ask me, Mrs. Pelz, the finest of the objects in this room of fine things, it won’t take me long to tell you,” said Mr. Feist, leaning forward to lift for closer gaze the framed photograph.

“Now you’re shouting, Feist!”

“That picture don’t half do her justice. If I do say it, Mr. Feist—if that child had to make her living, she’d be a fortune in pictures. ‘No, mamma,’ she always says; ‘God forbid if I have to make my living some day, I want to be a famous writer.’ I want you to read sometime, Mr. Feist, some of that girl’s poetry. I cry like a baby over the sad ones. And stories! There’s one about a poor little girl who could look out of her window into the house of a rich girl and—”

“Feist, her mother just hates that child!”

“Say, old man, I don’t see any medals on you for hating her.”

“He’s worse than I am, Mr. Feist; only, he hides it behind making fun of me. I always say if Bleema Pelz wanted the moon, her father would see to it that his property-man got the real one for her.”

“You—you’ve got a beautiful, sweet little girl there, Pelz. I don’t blame you.”

“Feist, if I didn’t know it, I’d be an ungrateful dog.”

“Her papa can’t realize, Mr. Feist, we haven’t got a baby any more.”

“I—realize it, Mrs. Pelz.”

“You—you see, Roody?”

“I—I—guess I’m the old-fashioned kind of a fellow, Pelz, when it comes to girls. I—I guess I do it the way they used to do it—the parents first—but—but—now that we—we’re on the subject—I—I like your daughter, Pelz—my God! Pelz, but—but I like your little daughter!”

An Augsburg clock ticked into a suddenly shaped silence, Mr. Pelz rising, Mr. Feist already risen.

“I haven’t got much besides a clean record and all that love or money can buy her, Pelz, but—well—you know me for what I am, and—”

“Indeed we do, Mr. Feist! I always say to my husband my favorite of all the young men who come here is—”

“You know what my standing—well, with men and in business is, Pelz, and as far as taking care of her goes, I can make her from a little princess into a little queen—”

“The young man that is lucky enough to get Bleema, Mr. Feist—”

“Not that the money part is everything, but if what I am suits you and Mrs. Pelz, I want to enter the ring for her. I might as well come out with it. I wouldn’t for anything on earth have her know that I’ve spoken to you—yet—not till after I’ve spoken with her—but—well, there’s my cards on the table, Pelz.”

Mr. Pelz held out a slow and rigid arm, one hand gripping, the other cupping Mr. Feist at the elbow.

“It’s the finest compliment I could pay to any man on God’s earth to say it, Feist, but if it’s got to be that my little baby girl has grown up to an age where she—”

“She’s already a year older than me when I married you, Roody.”

“If it’s got to be, then there’s one man on earth I can give her up to with happiness. That man is you, Feist.”

Into this atmosphere so surcharged that it had almost the singing quality of a current through it entered Miss Bleema Pelz, on slim silver heels that twinkled, the same diaphanous tulle of the photograph enveloping her like summer, her hair richer, but blending with the peach-bloom of her frock, the odor of youth her perfume.

“Bleema darling, you’re just in time!”

“Hello, moms!”—in the little lifted voice trained to modulation, and kissing Mrs. Pelz in light consideration of powdered areas. “Hello, dads!”—tiptoeing and pursing her mouth into a bud. “Good evening, Mr. Feist.”

“Looks like I’m the left-over in this party,” said Mr. Feist, slow to release her hand and wanting not to redden.

“Naughty-naughty!” said Miss Pelz, with a flash of eyes to their corners, a flouncing of tulle, and then landing ever so lightly on her father’s knee and at the immediate business of jerking open his tie. “Bad, bad dad! Didn’t let Sato dress him to-night.”

“You little red head, you!”

“Stop it! Hold up your chin.”

“Honey, we’re all starvationed.”

“Lester’ll be here any minute now.”

“Lester Spencer coming for dinner, Bleema?”

“Surely. I dropped him just now at the Lions’ Club to change his clothes. Now, don’t get excited, dads; he’s leaving right after dinner to catch his train for Horseshoe Bend.”

“I must tell Williams to lay another—”

“I’ve already told him, mamma. Here he is now! Come on in, Lester; you’re holding up the family. You’ve never met Mr. Feist, have you, the film king? You two ought to get acquainted—one makes the films and the other makes them famous.”

There was a round of greetings, Mr. Spencer passing a hand that had emerged white and slim through the ordeal of thousands of feet of heroics.

“How do you do, Mrs. Pelz? Boss! Mr. Feist, glad to know you!”

What hundreds of thousands of men, seeming to despise, had secretly, in the organ-reverberating darkness of the motion-picture theater, yearned over Mr. Lester Spencer’s chest expansion, hair pomade, and bulgeless front and shirt-front! When Lester Spencer, in a very slow fade-out, drew the exceedingly large-of-eye and heaving-of-bosom one unto his own immaculate bosom, whole rows of ladies, with the slightly open-mouthed, adenoidal expression of vicarious romance, sat forward in their chairs. Men appraised silently the pliant lay of shirt, the uncrawling coat-back, and the absence of that fatal divorce of trousers and waistcoat.

“I was telling my husband, Lester, my manicurist just raved to-day about you and Norma Beautiful in ‘The Lure of Silk.’”

“Isn’t that just the sweetest picture, moms?”

“It certainly is! Mr. Pelz took me down to the projection-room to see its first showing, and I give you my word I said to him and Sol—didn’t I, Roody?—‘That picture is a fortune.’ And never in my life did I fail to pick a winner—did I, Roody? I got a knack for it. Mr. Feist, have you seen ‘The Lure of Silk’?”

“Sorry to say I have not.”

“If you think that is a riot, Mrs. Pelz, you wait until you see the way they’re going to eat me up in the court scene in ‘Saint Elba.’ I had the whole studio crying down there to-day—didn’t I, Mr. Pelz? Crying like babies over the scene where I stand like this—so—overlooking—”

“Say, Rosie, that’s twice already Williams announced dinner is served.”

“Overlooking the—”

“I hear Friedman & Kaplan made an assignment, Feist.”

“Come, Lester; you take me in to dinner. Rudolph, you go and get mamma. Bleema, you and Mr. Feist be escorts.”

In a dining-room so unswervingly Jacobean that its high-back chairs formed an actual enclosure about the glittering, not to say noble, oval of table, the dinner-hour moved through the stately procession of its courses. At its head, Mrs. Miriam Sopinsky, dim with years and the kind of weariness of the flesh that Rembrandt knew so well, her face even yellower beneath the black wig with the bold row of machine-stitching down its center, the hands veiny and often uncertain among the dishes.

“Roody, cut up mamma’s chicken for her. She trembles so.”

“Moms, let Williams.”

“No; she likes it when your father does it.”

Mr. Pelz leaned over, transferring his own knife and fork. In Yiddish:

“Grandmother, I hear you’ve been flirting with Doctor Isadore Aarons. Now, don’t you let me hear any more such nonsense. The young girls in this house got to walk the straight line.”

The old face broke still more furiously into wrinkle, the hand reaching out to top his.

“Don’t tease her, Roody; she likes to be let alone in public.”

MR. FEIST: The old lady certainly holds her own, don’t she? Honest, I’d give anything if I knew how to talk to her a little.

“No, Mr. Feist, mamma’s breaking. Every day since her stroke I can see it more. It nearly kills me, too. It’s pretty lonesome for her, up here away from all her old friends. Outside of my husband and Bleema, not a soul in the house talks her language except Sol and Etta when they come over.”

“She’s my nice darling grandma,” said Miss Pelz, suddenly pirouetting up from her chair around the table, kissing the old lips lightly and then back again, all in a butterfly jiffy.

MRS. PELZ (sotto to Mr. Feist). Ain’t she the sweetest thing with her grandmother?

“Umh!” said Mr. Spencer, draining his wine-glass to the depth of its stem. “Mr. Pelz, believe me if the Atlantic Ocean was made out of this stuff, you wouldn’t have to engage passage for me; I’d swim across.”

“You better learn how first,” said Mr. Pelz. “You’ve cost me a fortune already in dummies for the water scenes.”

“It’s a riot, Mr. Pelz, the way they go mad over me in that Pelham Bay scene in ‘The Marines Are Coming.’ I dropped into the Buckingham to see it last night, and before I knew it the house had it that I was present and was going wild over me. They had to throw the spotlight on the box.”

“I love that scene, too, Lester! Honest, I just squeeze up with excitement where you stand there at the edge of the deck and take the plunge into the water to rescue Norma Beautiful.”

“You mean a super for five a day takes the plunge.”

“Tell you another scene where I simply raise the roof off the house in—”

MR. PELZ: Williams, pass Mr. Feist some more of them little cabbages.

“Brussels sprouts, dad.”

MRS. PELZ: I guess you miss Norma Beautiful not playing with you in “Saint Elba,” don’t you, Lester? You and her are so used to playing with each other.

“I was the one first suggested she wouldn’t be the type to play Josephine, Mrs. Pelz. Too thin. I’ve got to be contrasted right or it kills me—”

“Williams, a little more of that chicken stuffing. It’s almost good enough to remind me how you and grandma used to make it, Rosie.”

“Speaking of ‘Saint Elba,’ Mr. Pelz, somebody must speak to Mabel Lovely about the way she keeps hogging center-stage in that scene with me on—”

“There’s no center-stage left to hog with you in the picture, Spencer.”

“She crowds me to profile. They want me full-face. If you’d put in a word to Sol to direct it that way! Other night, at the Buckingham, it was a riot every time I turned full-face. Just because a fellow happens to have a good profile is no reason why—”

“Well, Feist, how does the war look to-day?”

“Ugly, Pelz, ugly. Every hour this country lets pass with Belgium unavenged she is going to pay up for later.”

“It’s not our fight, Mr. Feist.”

“Maybe it’s not our fight, Mr. Spencer, but if ever there was a cause that is all humanity’s fight, it is those bleeding and murdered women and children of Belgium. You’re sailing over there yourself next week, Mr. Spencer, and I hope to God you will see for yourself how much of our fight it is.”

“Ain’t things just simply terrible? Honest, I said to Roody, when I picked up the paper this morning, it gives me the blues before I open it.”

“Nobody can tell me that this country is going to sit back much longer and see autocracy grind its heel into the face of the world.”

“You’re right, Feist! I think if there is one thing worse than being too proud to fight, it is not being proud enough to fight.”

“Lester Spencer, if you don’t stop making eyes!”

“Mr. Pelz, every time I drink to your daughter only with my eyes she slaps me on the wrist. You put in a good word for me.”

“Little more of that ice-cream, Feist?”

“Thanks, Pelz; no.”

“You, Lester?”

“Don’t care if I do, Miss Bleema Butterfly.”

Mr. Pelz flashed out a watch. “Don’t want to hurry you, Spencer, but if you have to catch that ten-o’clock train, by the time you get back and change clothes—”

“You’re right, Mr. Pelz; I’d better be getting on.”

Miss Pelz danced to her feet. “Mamma and papa will excuse us, Lester, if we leave before coffee. Come; I’ll shoot you to the club.”

“Why, Bleema! George will bring the limousine around and—”

“I promised! Didn’t I promise you, Lester, that if you came up to dinner I’d drive you back to the club myself?”

“She sure did, Mrs. Pelz.”

“Bleema, you stay right here and finish your supper. There’s two chauffeurs on the place to drive Spencer around to his club.”

“But, dad, I promised.”

“Why, Bleema, ain’t you ashamed? Mr. Feist here for dinner and you to run off like that. Shame on you!”

“Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Pelz. I’ll stay around and be entertained by you and Mr.—”

“I’ll be back in twenty minutes, moms. Surely you’ll excuse me that long! I want to drive him down in my new runabout. I promised. Please, moms! Dad?”

“Ask your papa, Bleema; I—I don’t know—”

“Dad?”

“You heard what I said, Bleema. No!”

A quick film of tears formed over Miss Pelz’s eyes, her lips quivering. “Oh, well—if—if you’re going to be that mean—oh, you make me so mad—. Come on, Lester—I—I guess I can take you as far as the front door without the whole world jumping on me. Oh—oh—you make me so mad!” And pranced out on slim feet of high dudgeon.

“Poor child!” said Mrs. Pelz, stirring into her coffee. “She’s so high strung.”

“She’s got to quit wasting her time on that conceited jackass,” said Mr. Pelz, swallowing off his demi-tasse at a gulp. “Won’t have it!”

“It makes her papa mad the way the boys just kill themselves over that girl,” said Mrs. Pelz, arch of glance toward Mr. Feist, who was stirring also, his eyes lowered.

“Me, too,” he said, softly.

“Jealous!” flashed Mrs. Pelz.

After an interval, and only upon despatching a servant, Miss Pelz returned, the tears frank streaks now down her cheeks.

“Sit down, baby, and drink your coffee.”

“Don’t want any.”

“Williams, bring Miss Bleema some hot coffee.”

“I’m finished, mother—please!”

“I was telling Mr. Feist a while ago, Bleema, about your ambition to be a writer, not for money, but just for the pleasure in it. What is it you call such writing in your French, honey? Dilytanty?”

“Please, mamma, Mr. Feist isn’t interested.”

“Indeed I am, Miss Bleema! More interested than in anything I know of.”

“She’s mad at her papa, Feist, and when my little girl gets mad at her papa there’s nothing for him to do but apologize with a big kiss.”

Suddenly Miss Pelz burst into tears, a hot cascade of them that flowed down over her prettiness.

“Why, Bleema!”

“Now, now, papa’s girl—”

The grandmother made a quick gesture of uplifted hands, leaning over toward her, and Miss Pelz hiding her face against that haven of shrunken old bosom.

“Oh, grandma, make ’em let me alone!”

“Why, Bleema darling, I’m surprised! Ain’t you ashamed to act this way in front of Mr. Feist? What’ll he think?”

“Please, Mrs. Pelz, don’t mind me; she’s a little upset—that’s all.”

“You—you made me look like—like thirty cents before Lester Spencer—that—that’s what you did.”

“Why, Bleema, do you think that if papa thought that Lester Spencer was worth bothering that pretty red head of yours about that he would—”

“There you go again! Always picking on Lester. If you want to know it, next to Norma Beautiful and Allan Hunt he’s the biggest money-maker your old corporation has got.”

“What’s that got to do with you?”

“And he’ll be passing them all in a year or two, you see if he don’t—if—if—if only you’d stop picking on him and letting Uncle Sol crowd him out of the pictures and everybody in the company take advantage of him—he—he’s grand—he—”

“He’s a grand conceited fool. If not for the silly matinée women in the world he couldn’t make salt.”

“That shows all you know about him, papa! He’s got big ideals, Lester has. He got plans up his sleeve for making over the moving-picture business from the silly films they show nowadays to—”

“Yes—to something where no one gets a look-in except Lester Spencer. They’re looking for his kind to run the picture business!”

“Roody—Bleema—please! Just look at poor grandma! Mr. Feist, I must apologize.”

“He’s a nix, an empty-headed—”

“He is—is he? Well, then—well, then—since you force me to it—right here in front of Mr. Feist—Lester Spencer and I got engaged to-day! He’s the only man in my life. We’re going to be married right off, in time for me to sail for France with the company. He’s going to talk to you when he gets back from Horseshoe Bend. We’re engaged! That’s how much I think of Lester Spencer. That’s how much I know he’s the finest man in the world. Now then! Now then!”

There was a note in Miss Pelz’s voice that, in the ensuing silence, seemed actually to ring against the frail crystal. She was on her feet, head up, tears drying.

“Blee-Bleema!”

“Moms darling, aren’t you happy? Isn’t it wonderful—moms?”

“Roody! For God’s sake, Bleema, you’re choking your father to death! Roody, for God’s sake, don’t get so red! Williams—some water—quick! Roody!”

“I’m all right. All right, I tell you. She got me excited. Sit down, Bleema—sit down, I said.”

“Pelz, if you don’t mind, I think maybe I’d better be going.”

“You stay right here, Feist. I want you to hear every word that I’m going to say. If my daughter has no shame, I haven’t, either. Williams, call Mrs. Sopinsky’s maid, and see that she gets to her room comfortable. Sit down, Bleema!”

“My God!—I can’t believe my ears—Bleema and such a goy play-actor—”

“Please, Rosie!”

“A goy that—”

“Rosie, I said, ‘Please!’ Bleema, did you hear me? Sit down!”

Miss Pelz sat then, gingerly on the chair-edge, her young lips straight. “Well?”

Her father crunched into his stiff damask napkin, holding a fistful of it tense against bringing it down in a china-shivering bang. Then, with carefully spaced words, “If I didn’t think, Bleema, that you are crazy for the moment, infatuated with—”

“I’m not infatuated!”

“Bleema, Bleema, don’t talk to your father so ugly!”

“Well, I guess I know my own mind. I guess I know when I’m in love with the finest, darlingest fellow that ever—”

“You hush that, Bleema! Hush that, while I can hold myself in. That I should live to hear my child make herself common over a loafer—”

“Papa, if you call him another name, I—I—”

“You’ll sit right here and hear me out. If you think you’re going to let this loafer ruin your own life and the lives of your parents and poor grandmother—”

“Papa, papa, you don’t know him! The company are all down on him because they’re jealous. Lester Spencer comes from one of the finest old Southern families—”

“Roody, Roody, a goy play-actor—”

“‘A goy play-actor’! I notice, mamma, you are the one always likes to brag when the girls and fellows like Norma Beautiful and Allan Hunt and Lester and—and all come up to the house. It’s the biggest feather in your cap the way on account of papa the big names got to come running when you invite them.”

“Your mother’s little nonsenses have got nothing to do with it.”

“She reproaches me with having brought about this goy mix-up! Me that has planned each hour of that girl’s life like each one was a flower in a garden, A young man, a grand young man like Mr. Feist, crazy in lo—”

“Mrs. Pelz, for God’s sake! Mrs. Pelz, please!”

“Rosie, we’ll leave Feist out of this.”

“Lester Spencer, papa, is one of the finest characters, if only you—”

“I ask you again, Bleema, to cut out such talk while I got the strength left to hold in. It’s a nail in my coffin I should live to talk such talk to my little daughter, but it’s got to where I’ve got to say it. Lester Spencer and the fine character you talk about—it’s free gossip in all the studios—is one of the biggest low-lifes in the picture-world. He has a reputation with the women that I’m ashamed to mention even before your mother, much less her daughter—”

“Oh, I know what you mean! Oh, you’re like all the rest—down on him. You mean that silly talk about him and Norma Beautiful—”

“Oh my God, Roody, listen to her!”

“I can clear that up in a minute. He never cared a thing for her. It was just their always playing in the same pictures, and that silly matinée public, first thing he knew, got to linking their names together.”

“Bleema—for God’s sake—baby—what do you know about such?”

“Bleema, you’re killing your mother! Your mother that used to rock you in your cradle while she stitched on the machine to buy you more comforts—a mother that—”

“Oh, if you’re going to begin that!”

“Your poor old grandmother—don’t she mean nothing? You saw how she looked just now when they took her out, even before she knows what it’s all about—”

“I hope she never has a worse trouble than for me to marry the best—”

Then Mr. Pelz came down with crashing fist that shattered an opalescent wine-glass and sent a great stain sprawling over the cloth.

“By God, I’ll kill him first! The dirty hou—”

“Pelz, for God’s sake, control yourself!”

‘I’ll kill him, I tell you, Feist!”

“Roody!”

“You can’t scare me that way, dad. I’m no baby to be hollered at like that. I love Lester Spencer, and I’m going to marry him!”

“I’ll kill him; I’ll—”

“Roody, Roody, for God’s sake! ‘Sh-h-h, the servants! Williams, close quick all the doors. Roody, for my sake, if not your child’s! Mr. Feist, please—please make him, Mr. Feist!”

“Pelz, for God’s sake, man, get yourself together! Excitement won’t get you anywheres. Calm down. Be human.”

Then Mr. Pelz sat down again, but trembling and swallowing back with difficulty. “She got me wild, Feist. You must excuse me. She got me wild —my little girl—my little flower—”

“Papa—dad darling! Don’t you think it kills me, too, to see you like this? My own darling papa that’s so terribly good. My own darling sweet mamma. Can’t you see, darlings, a girl can’t help it when—when—life just takes hold of her? I swear to you—I promise you that, when you come to know Lester as I know him you’ll think him as fine and—and gorgeous as I do. Mamma, do you think your little Bleema would marry a man who doesn’t just love you, and dad, too? It isn’t like Lester is a nobody—a high-salaried fellow like him with a future. Why, the best will be none too good! He loves you both—told me so to-day. The one aim in his life is to do big things, to make you both proud, to make his name the biggest—”

“Feist—Feist—can’t you talk to her? Tell her it’s madness—tell her she’s ruining herself.”

“Why, Miss Bleema, there’s nothing much a—a stranger like me can say at a time like this. It’s only unfortunate that I happened to be here. If I were you, though, I think I’d take a little time to think this over. Sometimes a young girl—.”

“I have thought it over, Mr. Feist. For weeks and weeks I’ve thought of nothing else. That’s how sure I am—so terribly sure.”

“I won’t have it, I tell you! I’ll wring his—”

“‘Sh-h-h, Pelz. If you’ll take my advice, you’ll handle this thing without threats. Why not, Miss Bleema, even if you do feel so sure, give yourself a little more time to—”

“No! No! No!”

“Just a minute now. If you feel this way so strongly to-night, isn’t it just possible that to-morrow, when you wake up, you may see things differently?”

“I tell you I’m going to France with him—on our honeymoon. It’s all fixed if—moms—dad—won’t you please—darlings—can’t you see—my happiness—”

“O God, Roody, were ever parents in such a fix?”

“Listen to me, Miss Bleema, now: I’m an old friend of the family, and you don’t need to take exception to what I’m going to suggest. If your heart is so set on this thing, all right then, make up your mind it’s an engagement and—”

“By God, Feist, no!”

“Wait, Pelz, I tell you you’re making a mistake with your state of excitement.”

“Let Mr. Feist talk, Roody.”

“Make up your mind as I was saying, Miss Bleema, that this engagement exists between you and—and this young man. Then, instead of doing the hasty thing and marrying next week, you remain here a happy, engaged girl until the company returns in three weeks, and meanwhile you will have time to know your own mind and—”

“No! No! No! I do know it! It’s all fixed we’re—”

“That’s a fine idea of Mr. Feist’s, Bleema darling. For mamma’s sake, baby. For grandma’s. If it’s got to be an engagement, hold it until after he gets back. Don’t go rushing in. Take time to think a little. France is no place for a honeymoon now—submarines and all.”

“Oh, I know! You hope he’ll get sunk with a submarine.”

“Shame, Miss Bleema; shame!”

“All mamma means, darling, is take a little time and get a—a trousseau like a girl like you has to have. If your heart is so set on it, can’t you do that much to please mamma? That much?”

“There’s a trick. You want me to wait and then—”

“Miss Bleema, is my promise to you enough that there’s no trick? On my respect for your parents and grandmother, there’s no trick. If it is only to please them, wait those few weeks and do it more dignified. If it’s got to be, then it’s got to be. Am I right, Pelz?”

Mr. Pelz turned away, nodding his head, but with lips too wry to speak.

“O my God, yes! Mr. Feist, you’re right. Bleema, promise us! Promise!”

“Just a matter of a few weeks more or less, Miss Bleema. Just so your parents are satisfied you know your own mind.”

“I do!”

“Then, I say, if you still feel as you do, not even they have the right to interfere.”

“Promise us, Bleema; promise us that!”

“I—I’ll be engaged on your word of honor—without any fussing about it?”

“An engaged girl, Miss Bleema, like any other engaged girl.”

“But dad—look at him—he won’t—p-promise,” trembling into tears.

“Of course he will—won’t you, Pelz? And you know the reputation your father has for a man of his word.”

“Will—will he promise?”

“You do; don’t you, Pelz?”

Again the nod from the bitter inverted features.

“Now, Miss Bleema?”

“Well then, I—I—p-promise.”

On a May-day morning that was a kiss to the cheek and even ingratiated itself into the bale-smelling, truck-rumbling pier-shed, Mr. Lester Spencer, caparisoned for high seas by Fifth Avenue’s highest haberdasher, stood off in a little cove of bags and baggage, yachting-cap well down over his eyes, the nattiest thing in nautical ulsters buttoned to the chin. Beside him, Miss Norma Beautiful, her small-featured pink-and-whiteness even smaller and pinker from the depths of a great cart-wheel of rose-colored hat, completely swathed in rose-colored veiling.

“For a snap of my finger I’d spill the beans—that’s how stuck on this situation I am!”

Mr. Spencer plunged emphatic arms into large patch-pockets, his chin projecting beyond the muffle of collar.

“Just you try it and see where it lands you!”

Then Miss Beautiful from the rosy depths of hat began to quiver of voice, jerky little sobs catching her up.

“I can’t stand it! I b-bit off a b-bigger piece than I can swallow.”

“Now, Darling Beautiful, I ask you would your own Lester do anything that wasn’t just going to be the making of his girl as well as himself? Is it anything, Angel Beautiful, he is asking you to do except wait until—”

“I can’t bear it, I tell you! A little red-haired kike like her! How do I know what I’m letting myself in for? There’s only one ground for divorce in this state. What guarantee have I you’ll get free on it?”

“My guarantee, Pussy. You’re letting yourself in for a pink limousine to match that pink sweetness of yours and a jumping-rope of pearls to match those sweet teeth of yours and—”

“I want black pearls, Lester, like Lucille Du Pont’s.”

“Black, then. Why, Angel Beautiful, you just know that there’s not a hair on any head in the world, much less a red one, I’d change for one of my girl’s golden ones. You think I’d ever have known the little Reddie was on earth if she hadn’t just flung herself at my head! She could have been six Rudolph Pelz’s daughters, and I wouldn’t have had eyes for her.”

“But, Lester—she—she’s right cute. What guarantee have I got?”

“Cross my heart and swear to die, Angel! Haven’t I already sworn it to you a thousand thousand times? You wouldn’t want me to close my eyes to the chance of a lifetime—you know you wouldn’t, Beautiful, when it’s your chance as much as mine. Both ours!”

“I—if only it was—over, Lester—all—over!”

“What’s three weeks, Angel Beautiful? The very day I’m back I’ll pull the trick with the little red head, and then I’m for letting things happen quick.”

“And me, what’ll I—”

“I’m going to move you into the solid-goldest hotel suite in this here town, Pussy. I’m going to form the Norma Beautiful Film Corporation in my own girl’s name, the first pop out of the box. Why, there’s just nowhere Rudolph Pelz’s son-in-law can’t get his girl in the little while I’m going to stick.”

“How do I know? How do I know they won’t find a way to hold you?”

“Why, Darling Beautiful, when they’re through with me, they’ll pay me off in my weight in gold. Haven’t you said things often enough about your boy’s temper when he lets it fly? You think they’re going to let me cut up nonsense with that little Reddie of theirs? Why, that old man would pay with his right eye to protect her!”

“O God, it’s rotten—a nice fellow like Pelz—a—”

“It’s done every day, Gorgeous Beautiful. Anyway, there’s no way to really hurt the rich. Look at Warren Norton—the Talcott family paid Warren two hundred cool thousand to give her back quietly. It’s done every day, Gorgeousness. Many a fellow like me has gotten himself roped into a thing he wanted to get out of quietly. That little girl lassoed me. I should have eyes for a little Reddie like her with the Deep-Sea Pearl of the world my very own. I’m going to marry you, too, Gorgeousness. I’m going to see you right through, this time. Jump right out of the frying-pan into the hottest, sweetest fire!”

“I tell you I can’t stand it! Promising to marry me with another one to see through before you get to me. It—it’s terrible! I—”

“There you go again! The Norma Beautiful Film Corporation doesn’t tickle my pink rose on the eardrums! She doesn’t want it! Wouldn’t have it!”

“I do, Lester; I do—only—only—I—the little Reddie—it’s not right. She’s a sweet little thing. I’m afraid, Lester—I think I must be going crazy! I wish to God I could hate you the way you ought to be hated. I tell you I can’t stand it. You sailing off like this. The coming back—her—I’ll kill myself during the ceremony. I—”

“You create a scene down here and you’ll be sorry!”

“Lester—please!”

“They’ll be here any minute now. They’re late as it is. Look— everybody’s on board already! One more blast, and I’ll have to go, too. You just kick up nasty at the last minute and watch me!”

“I won’t, Lester; I won’t! I swear to God! Only, be good to me; be sweet to me, darling! Say good-by before they—she comes. I’m all right, darling. Please—please—”

He caught her to him then, and back in the sheltering cove of baggage thrust back her head, kissing deep into the veiling.

“Beautiful! Angel Beautiful!”

“Swear to me, Lester, you’ll see me through.”

“I swear, Beautiful.”

“Swear to me, or hope to die and lose your luck!”

He kissed her again so that her hat tilted backward, straining at its pins.

“Hope to die and lose my luck.”

“My own preciousness!” she said, her eyes tear-glazed and yearning up into his.

“‘Sh-h, Pussy; here comes Sol Sopinsky to hurry me on board. Funny the Pelz crowd don’t show up. Quit it! Here they come! That’s their car. Cut it—quick!”

With noiselessly thrown clutch, the Pelz limousine drew up between an aisle of bales, its door immediately flung open. First, Mr. Pelz emerging, with an immediate arm held back for Mrs. Pelz. Last, Miss Pelz, a delightful paradox of sheer summer silk and white-fox furs, her small face flushed and carefully powdered up about the eyes.

“There he is, dad! Over there with Norma and Uncle Sol!”

“Don’t run so, Bleema; he’ll come over to you.”

But she was around and through the archipelago of baggage.

“Lester darling! There was a tie-up at Thirty-third Street. I thought I’d die! Here’s a little package of letters, love, one for each day on the steamer. Lester, have you got everything—are you all ready to leave your girlie—Hello, Norma—Uncle Sol! Lester are you—you sorry to leave you—your—”

“Now, now—no water-works!”

“My all! My own boy!” She drew him, to hide the quickening trembling of her lips, back behind the shelter of piled baggage.

“Lester darling—I—I didn’t sleep a wink all night! I—I’m so nervous, dear. What if a submarine should catch you? What if you meet a French girl and fall in—”

“Now, now, Reddie! Is that what you think of your boy?”

“I don’t, dearest; I don’t! I keep telling myself I’m a silly—What’s three weeks? But when it means separation from the sweetest, dearest—”

“‘Sh-h-h, Angel darling! There’s the last blast, and your father’s angry. See him beckoning! The company’s been on board twenty minutes already. Look—there’s the sailors lined up at the gangplank—Bleema—”

“Promise me, Lester—”

“I do! I do promise! Anything! Look, girlie: Miss Beautiful will feel hurt the way we left her standing. It isn’t nice—our hiding this way.”

“I can’t bear, dearest, to see you go—”

“Look! See—there’s David Feist come down, too. You don’t want him to see my girl make a cry baby of herself over a three weeks’ trip—”

“You’ll write, Lester, and cable every day?”

“You just know I will!”

“You won’t go near the war?”

“You just know I won’t!”

“You—”

“Your father, Bleema—let’s not get him sore, hiding back here. Come; they’ll draw up the plank on me.”

“I’ll be waving out from the edge of the pier, darling. I’ve got a special permit to go out there. I just couldn’t stand not seeing my boy up to the last second. It’s terrible for you to sneak off on a boat like this, darling, without flags and music the way it was before the war. I want music and flags when my boy goes off. Oh, Lester, I’ll be working so hard on the sweetest little trousseau and the sweetest little—”

“Bleema, please! There’s Miss Beautiful overhearing every word. Please!” “Well, good-by, Miss Beautiful; don’t walk off with the studio while we’re gone—take care of yourself—”

“Good-by—Mr. Spencer—b-bon voyage!”

“Hi, Mr. Feist, mighty handsome of you to come down to see me off!”

“Safe journey, Spencer! Remember you’ve got a precious piece of anxiety waiting back here for you.”

“Oh, Mr. Feist—isn’t—isn’t—it awful—submarine-time and all? I—I just can’t bear it!”

“Now! Now! Is that the way for a brave little girl to talk?”

“Bleema, if you can’t control yourself, you had better go sit in the car. I’m ashamed before the company.”

“Roody, the poor child!”

“He—that’s the only way papa talks to me these days—fault-finding!”

“Now, now, Miss Bleema! Here—take mine; yours is all wet.”

Another blast then, reverberating into the din.

“All aboard!”

“Good-by, Lester—good-by, darling—cable every day—by—good-by—boy!”

“Good-by, little Reddie! Thanks for the beautiful fruits and letters. Good-by, Mr. Pelz!”

“Play fair in the picture, Spencer. Don’t hog the scenes. Help instead of hinder Sopinsky.”

“Indeed I will, sir! Good-by, Mrs. Pelz!”

“Good-by, Lester! God bless you, my boy! Take care of yourself, and remember my little girl is—”

“Lester—Lester, a cable every day!”

“Bleema, will you please let the man catch his boat? It’s an embarrassment to even watch you.”

“Lester—Lester—”

“Yes, yes; good-by, everybody!”

“I’ll be out at the pier-edge—wave back, darling!”

“Yes, yes! Good-by, Miss Beautiful! By, all!” And then, from an upper deck, more and more shouted farewells.

“They’re moving! Come, Mr. Feist—please—with me—I’ve got the permit—don’t let papa see us—come—the pier-edge!”

“Sure! This way, Miss Bleema—here—under—quick!”

Out in the open, May lay with Italian warmth over a harbor that kicked up the tiniest of frills. A gull cut through the blueness, winging it in festoons.

“Over this way, Miss Bleema; we can see her steaming out.”

“Lester—good-by—Lester—a cable every day! I’ll be waiting. Good-by!”

All this unavailingly flung to the great hulk of boat moving so proud of bow and so grandly out to sea, decks of faces and waving kerchiefs receding quickly.

“Good-by—darling—oh—oh—”

“‘Sh-h—’sh-h-h, Miss Bleema. Here—take another of mine. Yours is all wet again. My—what a rainy day! Here—let me dry them for you. Hold still!”

“Oh—oh—cable every day, darling—write—oh, Mr. Feist—he don’t see us—he’s out of sight—don’t wipe ’em so hard, Mr. Feist—you—you h-hurt!”

Out toward the blue, the billowing fields sailed away the gray steamer, cutting a path that sprayed and sang after. Sunlight danced and lay whitely as far as the eye could reach. It prolonged for those on shore the contour of the line of faces above each deck; it picked points of light from off everywhere—off smokestacks and polished railings, off plate-glass and brass-bound port-holes and even down the ship’s flank, to where gilt letters spelled out shiningly:

“LUSITANIA.”

A Boob Spelled Backward

How difficult it is to think of great lives in terms of the small mosaics that go to make up the pattern of every man’s day-by-day—the too tepid shaving-water; the badly laundered shirt-front; the three-minute egg; the too-short fourth leg of the table; the draught on the neck; the bad pen; the neighboring rooster; the misplaced key; the slipping chest-protector.

Richelieu, who walked with kings, presided always at the stitching of his red robes. Boswell says somewhere that a badly starched stock could kill his Johnson’s morning. It was the hanging of his own chintzes that first swayed William Morris from epic mood to household utensils. Seneca, first in Latin in the whole Silver Age, prepared his own vegetables. There is no outgrowing the small moments of life, and to those lesser ones of us how often they become the large ones!

To Samuel Lipkind, who, in a span of thirty years, had created and carried probably more than his share of this world’s responsibilities, there was no more predominant moment in all his day, even to the signing of checks and the six-o’clock making of cash, than that matinal instant, just fifteen minutes before the stroke of seven, when Mrs. Lipkind, in a fuzzy gray wrapper the color of her eyes and hair, kissed him awake, and, from across the hall, he could hear the harsh sing of his bath in the drawing.

There are moments like that which never grow old. For the fifteen years that Samuel Lipkind had reached the Two Dollar Hat Store before his two clerks, he had awakened to that same kiss on his slightly open mouth, the gray hair and the ever-graying eyes close enough to be stroked, the pungency of coffee seeming to wind like wreaths of mundane aroma above the bed, and always across the aisle of hallway that tepid cataract leaping in glory into porcelain.

Take the particular morning which ushers in our story, although it might have been any of twelve times three hundred others.

“Sammy!” This upon opening his door, then crossing to close the conservative five inches of open window and over to the bedside for the kissing him awake. “Sammy, get up!”

The snuggle away into the crotch of his elbow.

“Sammy! Thu, thu! I can’t get him up! Sammy, a quarter to seven! You want to be late? I can’t get him up!”

“M-m-m-m-m-m!”

“You want your own clerks to beat you to business so they can say they got a lazy boss?”

“I’m awake, ma.” Reaching up to stroke her hair, thin and gray now, and drawn back into an early-morning knob.

“Don’t splash in the bath-room so this morning, Sammy; it’s a shame for the wall-paper.”

“I won’t”—drawing the cord of his robe about his waist, and as if they did not both of them know just how faithfully disregarded would be that daily admonition.

Then Mrs. Lipkind flung back the snowy sheets and bed-coverings, baring the striped ticking of the mattress.

“Hurry, Sammy! I’m up so long I’m ready for my second cup of coffee.”

“Two minutes.” And off across the hall, whistling, towel across arm.

It was that little early moment sublimated by nothing more than the fusty beginnings of a workaday, the mere recollecting of which was one day to bring a wash of tears behind his eyes and a twist of anguish into his heart.

Next breakfast, and to dine within reach of the coal-range which brews it is so homely a fashion that even Mr. Lipkind, upon whom such matters of bad form lay as a matter of course, was wont to remonstrate.

“What’s the matter with the dining-room, ma? Since when have dining-rooms gone out of style?”

Pouring his coffee from the speckled granite pot, Mrs. Lipkind would smile up and over it.

“All I ask is my son should never have it worse than to eat all his lifetime in just such a kitchen like mine. Off my kitchen floor I would rather eat than off some people’s fine polished mahogany.”

The mahogany was almost not far-fetched. There was a blue-and-white spick-and-spanness about Mrs. Lipkind’s kitchen which must lie within the soul of the housewife who achieves it—the lace-edged shelves, the scoured armament of dishpan, soup-pot, and what not; the white Swiss window-curtains, so starchy, and the two regimental geraniums on the sill; the roller-towel too snowy for mortal hand to smudge; the white sink, hand-polished; the bland row of blue-and-white china jars spicily inscribed to nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves. That such a kitchen could be within the tall and brick confines of an upper-Manhattan apartment-house was only another of the thousand thousand paradoxes over which the city spreads her glittering skirts. The street within roaring distance, the highway of Lenox Avenue flowing dizzily constantly past her windows, the interior of Mrs. Lipkind’s apartment, from the chromos of the dear dead upon its walls to the upholstery of another decade against those walls, was as little of the day as if the sweep of the city were a gale across a mid-Victorian plain and the flow past the windows a broad river ruffled by wind.

“You’re right, ma; there’s not a kitchen in New York I’d trade it for. But what’s the idea of paying rent on a dining-room?”

“Sa-y, if not for when Clara comes and how in America all young people got extravagant ideas, we was just as well off without one in our three rooms in Simpson Street.”

“A little more of that mackerel, please.”

You to whom the chilled grapefruit and the eggshell cup of morning coffee are a gastronomic feat not always easy to hurdle, raise not your digestive eyebrows. At precisely fifteen minutes past seven six mornings in the week, seven-thirty, Sundays, Mrs. Lipkind and her son sat down to a breakfast that was steamingly fit for those only who dwell in the headacheless kingdom of long, sleepful nights and fur-coatless tongues.

“A few more fried potatoes with it, Sammy?”

“Whoa! You want to feed me up for the fat boys’ regiment!”

Mrs. Lipkind glanced quickly away, her profile seeming to quiver. “Don’t use that word, Sam—even in fun—it’s a knife in me.”

“What word?”

“‘Regiment.’”

He reached across to pat the vein-corduroyed back of her hand.

“My little sweetheart mamma,” he said.

She, in turn, put out her hand over his, her old sagging throat visibly constricting in a gulp, and her eyes as if they could never be finished with yearning over him. “You’re a good boy, Sammy.”

“Sure!”

“I always say no matter what it is bad my life has had for me with my twenty-five years a widow, my only daughter to marry out six hundred miles away from me, my business troubles when I had to lose the little store what your papa left me, nothing ain’t nothing, Sammy, when a mother can raise for herself a boy like mine.”

“You mean when a fellow can pick out for himself a little sweetheart mamma like mine.”

“Sammy, stop it with your pinching-me nonsense like I was your best girl!”

“Well, ain’t you?”

She paused, her cup of coffee half-way to her lips, the lines of her face seeming to want to lift into what would be a smile. “No, Sammy; your mother knows she ain’t, and if she was anything but a selfish old woman, she would be glad that she ain’t.”

“‘Sh! ‘Sh!” said Mr. Lipkind, reaching this time half across the table for a still steaming muffin and opening it so that its hot fragrance came out. ‘“Sh! No April showers! Uh! Uh! Don’t you dare!”

“I ain’t,” said Mrs. Lipkind, smiling through her tear and dashing at it with the back of her hand. “For why should I when I got only everything to be thankful for?”

“Now you’re shouting!”

“How you think, Sammy, Clara likes a cheese pie for supper to-night? Last week I could see she didn’t care much for the noodle pudding I baked her.”

Mr. Lipkind, who was ever so slightly and prematurely bald and still more slightly and prematurely rotund, suffered a rush of color then, his ears suddenly and redly conspicuous.

“That’s—that’s what I started to tell you last night, ma. Clara telephoned over to the store in the afternoon she—she thought she wouldn’t come to supper this Wednesday night, ma.”

“Sammy—you—you and Clara ’ain’t got nothing wrong together, the way you don’t see each other so much these two months?”

“Of course not, ma; it’s just happened a few times that way. The trade’s in town; that’s all.”

“How is it all of a sudden a girl in the wholesale ribbon business should have the trade to entertain like she was in the cloak-and-suit chorus?”

“It’s not that Clara’s busy to-night, ma. She—she only thought she—for a change—there’s a little side table for two—for three—where she boards—she thought maybe if—if you didn’t mind, I’d go over to her place for Wednesday-night supper for a change. You know how a girl like Clara gets to feeling obligated.”

“Obligated from eating once a week supper in her own future house!”

“She asked I should bring you, too, ma, but I know how bashful you are to go in places like that.”

“In such a place where it’s all style and no food—yes.”

“That’s it; so we—I thought, ma, that is, if you don’t mind, instead of Clara here to-night for supper, I—I’d go over to her place. If you don’t mind, ma.”

There was a silence, so light, so slight that it would not have even held the dropping of a pin, but yet had a depth and a quality that set them both to breathing faster.

“Why, of course, Sammy, you should go!”

“I—we thought for a change.”

“You should have told me yesterday, Sammy, before I marketed poultry.”

“I know, ma; I—just didn’t. Clara only ’phoned at four.”

“A few more fried potatoes?”

“No more.”

“Sit up straight, Sam, from out your round shoulders.”

“You ain’t—mad, ma?”

“For why, Sammy, should I be mad that you go to Clara for a change to supper. I’m glad if you get a change.”

“It’s not that, ma. It’s just that she asked it. You know how a person feels, her taking her Wednesday-night suppers here for more than five years and never once have I—we—set foot in any of her boarding-houses. She imagines she’s obligated. You know how Clara is, so independent.”

“You should go. I hear, too, how Mrs. Schulem sets a good table.”

“I’ll be home by nine, ma—you sure you don’t mind?”

“I wouldn’t mind, Sammy, if it was twelve. Since when is it that a grown-up son has to apologize to his mother if he takes a step without her?”

“You can believe me, ma, but I’ve got so it don’t seem like theater or nothing seems like going out without my little sweetheart mamma on one arm and Clara on the other.”

“It’s not right, Sammy, you should spoil me so. Don’t think that even if you don’t let me talk about it, I don’t know in my heart how I’m in yours and Clara’s way.”

“Ma, now just you start that talk and you know what I’ll do—I’ll get up and leave the table.”

“Sammy, if only you would let me talk about it!”

“You heard what I said.”

“To think my son should have to wait with his engagement for five years and never once let his mother ask him why it is he waits. It ain’t because of to-night I want to talk about it, Sam, but if I thought it was me that had stood between you and Clara all these five years, if—if I thought it was because of me you don’t see each other so much here lately, I—”

“Ma!”

“I couldn’t stand it, son. If ever a boy deserved happiness, that boy is you. A boy that scraped his fingers to the bone to marry his sister off well. A boy that took the few dollars left from my notion-store and made such a success in retail men’s hats and has given it to his mother like a queen. If I thought I was standing in such a boy’s way, who ain’t only a grand business man and a grand son and brother, but would make any girl the grandest husband that only his father before him could equal, I couldn’t live, Sammy, I couldn’t live.”

“You should know how sick such talk makes me!”

“I haven’t got hard feelings, Sammy, because Clara don’t like it here.”

“She does.”

“For why should an up-to-date American girl like Clara like such an old-fashioned place as I keep? Nowadays, girls got different ideas. They don’t think nothing of seventy-five-dollar suits and twelve-dollar shoes. I can’t help it that it goes against my grain no matter how fine a money-maker a girl is. In the old country my sister Carrie and me never even had shoes on our feet until we were twelve, much less—”

“But, ma—”

“Oh, I don’t blame her, Sam. I don’t blame her that she don’t like it the way I dish up everything on the table so we can serve ourselves. She likes it passed the way they did that night at Mrs. Goldfinger’s new daughter-in-law’s, where everything is carried from one to the next one, and you got to help yourself quick over your shoulders.”

“Clara’s like me, ma; she wants you to keep a servant to do the waiting on you.”

“It ain’t in me, Sam, to be bossed to by a servant, just like I can’t take down off the walls pictures of your papa selig and your grandma, because it ain’t stylish they should be there. It’s a feeling in me for my own flesh and blood that nothing can change.”

“Clara don’t want you to change that, ma.”

“She’s a fine, up-to-date girl, Sam. A girl that can work herself up to head floor-lady in wholesale ribbons and forty dollars a week has got in her the kind of smartness my boy should have in his wife. I’m an old woman standing in the way of my boy. If I wasn’t, I could go out to Marietta, Ohio, by Ruby, and I wouldn’t keep having inside of me such terrible fears for my boy and—and how things are now on the other side and—and—”

“Now, now, ma; no April showers!”

“An old woman that can’t even be happy with a good daughter like Ruby, but hangs always on her son like a stone around his neck!”

“You mean like a diamond.”

“A stone, holding him down.”

“Ma!” Mr. Lipkind pushed back, napkin awry at his throat and his eyes snapping points of light. “Now if you want to spoil my breakfast, just say so and I—I’ll quit. Why should you be living with Ruby out in Marietta if you’re happier here with me where you belong? If you knew how sore these here fits of yours make me, you’d cut them out—that’s what you would. I’m not going over to Clara’s at all now for supper, if that’s how you feel about it.”

Mrs. Lipkind rose then, crossed, leaning over the back of his chair and inclosing his face in the quivering hold of her two hands. “Sammy, Sammy, I didn’t mean it! I know I ain’t in your way. How can I be when there ain’t a day passes I don’t invite you to get married and come here to live and fix the flat any way what Clara wants or even move down-town in a finer one where she likes it? I know I ain’t in your way, son. I take it back.”

“Well, that’s more like it.”

“You mustn’t be mad at mamma when she gets old-fashioned ideas in her head.”

He stroked her hand at his cheek, pressing it closer.

“Sit down and finish your breakfast, little sweetheart mamma.”

“Is it all right now, Sammy?”

“Of course it is!” he said, his eyes squeezed tightly shut.

“Promise mamma you’ll go over by Clara’s to-night.”

“But—”

“Promise me, Sammy; I can’t stand it if you don’t.”

“Alright, I’ll go, ma.”

The Declaration of Economic Independence is not always a subtle one. There was that about Clara Bloom, even to the rather Hellenic swing of her very tailor-made back and the firm, neat clack of her not too high heels, which proclaimed that a new century had filed her fetter-free from the nine-teen-centuries-long chain of women whose pin-money had too often been blood-money or the filched shekels from trousers pocket or what in the toga corresponded thereto.

And yet, when Miss Bloom smiled, which upon occasion she did spontaneously enough to show a gold molar, there were not only Hypatia and Portia in the straight line of her lips, but lurked in the little tip-tilt at the corners a quirk from Psyche, who loved and was so loved, and in the dimple in her chin a manhole, as it were, for Mr. Samuel Lipkind.

At six o’clock, where the wintry workaday flows into dusk and Fifth Avenue flows across Broadway, they met, these two, finding each other out in the gaseous shelter of a Subway kiosk. She from the tall, thin, skylightless skyscraper dedicated to the wholesale supply of woman’s insatiable demand for the ribbon gewgaw; he from a plate-glass shop with his name inscribed across its front and more humbly given over to the more satiable demand of the male for the two-dollar hat. There was a gold-and-black sign which ran across the not inconsiderable width of Mr. Lipkind’s store-front and which invariably captioned his four inches of Sunday-news-paper advertisement:

Sammy Lipkind Wants Your Head

As near as it is possible for the eye to simulate the heart, there was exactly that sentiment in his glance now as he found out Miss Bloom, she in a purple-felt hat and the black scallops of escaping hair, blacker because the red was out in her cheeks.

He broke into the kind of smile that lifted his every feature, screw-lines at his eyes coming out, head bared, and his greeting beginning to come even before she was within hearing distance of it.

There was in Mr. Lipkind precious little of Lothario, Launcelot, Galahad, or any of that blankety-blank-verse coterie. There remains yet unsung the lay of the five-foot-five, slightly bald, and ever so slightly rotund lover. Falstaff and Romeo are the extremes of what Mr. Lipkind was the not unhappy medium. Offhand in public places, men would swap crop conditions and city politics with him. Twice, tired mothers in railway stations had volunteered him their babies to dandle. Young women, however, were not all impervious to him, and uncrossed their feet and became consciously unconscious of him across street-car aisles. In his very Two Dollar Hat Store, Sara Minniesinger, hooked of profile, but who had impeccably kept his debits and credits for twelve years back under the stock-balcony and a green eye-shade, was wont to cry of evenings over and for him into her dingy pillow. He was so unconscious of this that, on the twelfth anniversary of her incarceration beneath the stock-balcony, he commissioned his mother to shop her a crown of thorns in the form of a gold-handled umbrella with a bachelor-girl flash-light attachment.

There are men like that, to whom life is not only a theosophy of one God, but of one women who is sufficient thereof. When Samuel Lipkind greeted Clara Bloom there was just that in his ardently appraising glance.

“Didn’t mean to keep you waiting, Clara—a last-minute customer. You know.”

“I’ve been counting red heads and wishing the Subway was pulled by white horses.”

“Say, Clara, but you look a picture! Believe me, Bettina, that is some lid!”

Miss Bloom tucked up a rear strand of curl, turning her head to extreme profile for his more complete approval.

“Is it an elegant trifle, Sam? I ask you is it an elegant trifle?”

“Clara, it’s—immense! The best yet! What did it set you back?”

“Don’t ask me! I’m afraid just saying it would give your mother heart-failure by mental telepathy.”

He linked her arm. “Whatever you paid, it’s worth the money. It sets you off like a gipsy queen.”

“None of that, Sam! Mush is fattening.”

“Mush nothing! It’s the truth.”

“Hurry. Schulem’s got a new rule—no reserving the guest-table.”

They let themselves be swept into the great surge of the underground river with all of the rather thick-skinned unsensitiveness to shoulder-to-shoulder contact which the Subway engenders. Swaying from straps in a locked train, which tore like a shriek through a tube whose sides sweated dampness, they talked in voices trained to compete with the roar.

“What’s the idea, Clara? When you telephoned yesterday I was afraid maybe it was—Eddie Leonard cutting in on my night again.”

“Eddie nothing. Is it a law, Sam, that I have to eat off your mother every Wednesday night of my life?”

“No—only—you know how it is when you get used to things one way.”

“I told you I had something to talk over, didn’t I?”

They were rounding a curve now, so that they swayed face to face, nose to nose.

A few crinkles, frequent with him of late, came out in rays from his eyes.

“Is it anything you—you couldn’t say in front of ma?”

“Yes.”

He inserted two fingers into his collar, rearing back his head.

“Anything wrong, Clara?”

“You mean is anything right.”

They rode in silence after that, both of them reading in three colors the border effulgencies of frenzied advertising.

But when they emerged to a quieter up-town night that was already pointed with a first star, he took her arm as they turned off into a side-street that was architecturally a barracks to the eye, brownstone front after brownstone front after brownstone front. Block after block of New York’s side-streets are sunk thus in brown study.

“You mustn’t be so ready to be put out over every little thing I say, Clara. Is it anything wrong to want you up at the house just as often as we can get you?”

“No, Sam; it ain’t that.”

“Well then, what is it?”

“Oh, what’s the use beginning all that again? I want to begin to-night where we usually leave off.”

“Is it—is it something we’ve talked about before, Clara?”

“Yes—and no. We’ve talked so much and so long without ever getting anywheres—what’s the difference whether we’ve ever talked it before or not?”

“You just wait, Clara; everything is going to come out fine for us.”

Her upper lip lifted slightly. “Yes,” she said; “I’ve heard that before.”

“We’re going to be mighty happy some day, just the same, and don’t you let yourself forget it. We’ve got good times ahead.”

“Oh dear!” she sighed out.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He patted her arm. “You’ll never know, Clara, the torture it’s been for me even your going out those few times with Eddie Leonard has put me through. You’re mine, Clara; a hundred Eddies couldn’t change that.”

“Who said anybody wanted to change it?”

He patted her arm again very closely. “You’re a wonderful girl, Clara.”

They turned up the stoop of Mrs. Schulem’s boarding-house, strictly first-class. How they flourish in the city, these institutions of the Not Yet, the Never Was, the Never Will Be, and the Has Been! They are the half-way houses going up and the mausoleums coming down life’s incline, and he who lingers is lost to the drab destiny of this or that third-floor-back hearthstone, hot and cold running water, all the comforts of home. That is why, even as she moved up from the rooming to the boarding-house and down from the third-floor back to the second-story front, there was always under Clara Bloom’s single bed the steamer-trunk scarcely unpacked, and in her heart the fear that, after all, this might not be transiency, but home. That is why, too, she paid her board by the week and used printed visiting-cards.

And yet, if there exists such a paradox as an aristocracy among boarding-houses, Mrs. Schulem’s was of it. None of the boiled odors lay on her hallways, which were not papered, but a cream-colored fresco of better days. There was only one pair of bisques, no folding-bed, and but the slightest touch of dried grasses in her unpartitioned front parlor. The slavey who opened the door was black-faced, white-coated, and his bedraggled skirts were trousers with a line of braid up each seam. Two more of him were also genii of the basement dining-hall, two low rooms made into one and entirely bisected by a long-stemmed T of dining-table, and between the lace-curtained windows a small table for two, with fairly snowy napkins flowering out of its water-tumblers, and in its center a small island of pressed-glass vinegar-cruet, bottle of darkly portentous condiment, glass of sugar, and another of teaspoons.

It was here that Miss Bloom and Mr. Lipkind finally settled themselves, snugly and sufficiently removed from the T-shaped battalion of eyes and ears to insure some privacy.

“Well,” said Mr. Lipkind, unflowering his napkin, spreading it across his knees, and exhaling, “this is fine!”

There was an aura of authoritativeness seemed to settle over Miss Bloom.

This to one of the black-faced genii: “Take care of us right to-night, Johnson, and I’ll fix it up with you. See if you can’t manage it in the kitchen to bring us a double portion of those banana fritters I see they’re eating at the big table. Say they’re for Miss Bloom. I’ll fix it up with you.”

“Now, Clara, don’t you go bothering with extras for me. This is certainly fine. Sorry you never asked me before.”

“You know why I never asked you before.”

“Why, you never saw the like how pleased ma was. She was the first one to fall in with the idea of my coming to-night.”

She dipped into a shallow plate of amber soup. “I know,” she said, “all about that.”

“Ma’s a good sport about being left at home alone.”

“How do you know? You never tried it until to-night. I’ll bet it’s the first time since that night you first met me, five years ago, at Jerome Fertig’s, and it wouldn’t have been then if she hadn’t had the neuralgia and it was your own clerk’s wedding.”

He laid down his spoon, settling back a bit from the table, pulling the napkin across his knees out into a string.

“I thought we’d gone all over that, Clara.”

“Yes; but where did it get us? That’s why we’re here to-night, Sam—to get somewheres.”

He crumbed his bread. “What do you mean, Clara?”

She forced his slow gaze to hers calmly, her hands outstretched on the table between them. “I’ve made up my mind, Sam. Things can’t go on this way no longer between us.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“I mean that we’ve either got to act or quit.”

He was rolling the bread pills again, a flush rising. “You know where I stand, Clara, on things between us.”

“Yes, Sam, and now you know where I stand.” The din of the dining-room surged over the pause between them. Still in the purple hat, and her wrap thrown back over her chair, she held that pause coolly, level of eye. “I’m thirty-one now, Sam, three weeks and two days older than you. I don’t see the rest of my days with the Arnstein Ribbon Company. I’m not getting any younger. Five years is a long time out of a girl’s life. Five of the best ones, too. She likes to begin to see her future when she reaches my age. A future with a good providing man. You and me are just where we started five years ago.”

“I know, Clara, and I’d give my right hand to change things.”

“If I’d been able to save a cent, it might be different. But I haven’t—I’m that way. I make big and spend big. But you can’t blame a girl for wanting to see her future. That’s me, and I’m not ashamed to say it.”

“If only, Clara, I could get you to see things my way. If you’d be willing to try it with ma. Why, with a little diplomacy from you, ma’d move heaven and earth to please you.”

“There’s no use beginning that, Sam; it’s a waste of time. Why—why, just the difference in the way me and—and your mother feel on money matters is enough. There’s no use to argue that with me; it’s a waste of time.”

He lifted and let droop his shoulders with something of helplessness in the gesture. “What’s the use, then? I’m sure I don’t know what more to say to you, Clara. Oh, don’t think my mother don’t realize how things are between us—it’s all I can do to keep denying and denying.”

“Well, you can’t say she knows from my telling.”

“No; but there’s not a day she don’t say to me, particularly these last few times since you been breaking your dates with us pretty regular—I—well she sees how it worries me, and there’s not a day she don’t say to me, ‘Sammy,’ she said to me, only this morning, ‘if I thought I was keeping you and Clara apart—’”

“A blind man could see it.”

“There’s not a day passes over her head she don’t offer to go to live with my sister in Ohio, when I know just how that one month of visiting her that time nearly killed her.”

“Funny visiting an own daughter could nearly kill anybody.”

“It’s my brother-in-law, Clara. My mother couldn’t no more live with Isadore Katz than she could fly. He’s a fine fellow and all that, but she’s not used to a man in the house that potters around the kitchen and the children’s food and things like Isadore loves to. She’s used to her own little home and her own little way.”

“Exactly.”

“If I want to kill my mother, Clara, all I got to do is put her away from me in her old age. Even my sister knows it. ‘Sammy,’ she wrote to me that time after ma’s visit out there, ‘I love our mother like you do, but I got a nervous husband who likes his own ways about the housekeeping and the children and the cooking, and nobody knows better than me that the place for ma to be happy is with you in her own home and her own ways of doing.’”

“I call that a nerve for a sister to let herself out like that.”

“It’s not nerve, Clara; it’s the truth. Ruby’s a good girl in her way.”

“What about you—ain’t your life to be thought of? Ain’t it enough she was married off with enough money for her husband to buy a half-interest in a ladies’ ready-to-wear store out there?”

“Why, if I was to bring my little wife to that flat of ours, Clara, or any other kind further down-town that she’d want to pick out for herself, I think my mother would just walk on her hands and knees to make things pleasant for her. Maybe you don’t know it, but on your Wednesday nights up at the house, she is up at five o’clock in the morning fixing around and cooking the things she thinks you’ll like.”

“I’m not saying a word against your mother, Sam. I think she’s a grand woman, and I admire a fellow that’s good to his mother. I always say, ‘Give me a fellow every time that is good to his mother and that fellow will be good to his wife.’”

“I’m not pretending to say ma mayn’t be a little peculiar in her ways, but you never saw an old person that wasn’t, did you? Neither am I saying it’s exactly any girl’s idea to start out married life with a third person in—”

“I’ve always swore to myself, Sam, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, that if I can’t marry to improve myself, I’m going to stay single till I can. I’m not a six-dollar-a-week stenog that has to marry for enough to eat. I can afford to buy a seventy-five dollar suit every winter of my life and twelve-dollar shoes every time I need them. The hat on my head cost me eighteen-fifty wholesale, without having to be beholding to nobody, and—”

“Ma don’t mean those things, Clara. It’s just when she hears the price girls pay for things nowadays she can’t help being surprised the way things have changed.”

“I’m not a small potato, Sam. I never could live like a small potato.”

“Why, you know there’s nothing I like better than to see you dressed in the best that money can buy. You heard what I said about that hat just now, didn’t you? Whatever it cost, it’s worth it. I can afford to dress my little wife in the best that comes. There’s nothing too good for her.”

“Yes; but—”

“All ma needs, Clara, is a little humoring. She’s had to stint so all her life, it’s a little hard to get her used to a little prosperity. Take me. Why, if I bring her home a little shawl or a pockabook that cost, say, ten dollars, you think I tell her? No. I say, ‘Here’s a bargain I picked up for three ninety-eight,’ and right away she’s happy with something reduced.”

“Your mother and me, Sam, and, mind you, I’m not saying she isn’t a grand old lady, wasn’t no more made to live together than we was made to fly. I couldn’t no more live her way than she could live mine. I’ve got a practical head on my shoulders—I don’t deny it—and I want to improve ourselves in this world when we marry, and have an up-to-date home like every young couple that starts out nowadays.”

“Sure, we—”

“That flat of yours up there or any other one under the conditions would be run like the ark. I’m an up-to-date girl, I am. There’s not a girl living would be willing to marry a well-off fellow like you and go huck herself in a place she couldn’t even have the running of herself or have her own say-so about the purse-strings. It may sound unbecoming, but when I marry I’m going to better myself, I am.”

“I—why—”

“If she can’t even stand for her own son-in-law walking into his own kitchen in his own house—Oh, you don’t find me starting my married life that way at this late date. I haven’t held off five years for that.”

Mr. Lipkind pushed back his but slightly tasted food, lines of strain and a certain whiteness out in his face. “It—it just seems awful, Clara, this going around in a circle and not getting anywheres.”

“I’m at the end of my rope, I am.”

“I see your point in a way, Clara, but, my God! a man’s mother is his mother! It’s eating up my life just as it’s eating yours, but what you going to do about it? It just seems the best years of our life are going, waiting for God knows what.”

Hands clasped until her finger-nails whitened, Miss Bloom leaned across the table, her voice careful and concentrated. “Now you said something! That’s why you and me are here alone together to-night. There’s not going to be a sixth year of this kind of waiting between us. Things have got to come to a head. I’ve got a chance, Sam, to marry. Eddie Leonard has asked me.”

“I—thought so.”

“Eddie Leonard ain’t a Sam Lipkind, but after the war his five-thousand-dollar job is down at Arnstein’s waiting for him, and he’s got a good stiff bank-account saved as good as yours and—and no strings to it. I believe in a girl facing those facts the same as any other facts. Why, I—this war and all—why, if anything was to happen to you to-morrow—us unmarried this way—I’d be left high and dry without so much as a penny to show for the best five years of my life. We’ve got to do one thing or another, Sam. I believe in a girl being practical as well as romantic.”

“I—see your point, Clara.”

“I’m done with going around in this circle of ours.”

“You mean—”

“You know what I mean.”

The lower half of Mr. Lipkind’s face seemed to lock, as it were, into a kind of rigidity which shot out his lower jaw. “I’ll see Eddie Leonard burning like brimstone before I let him have you!”

“Well?”

“God! I don’t know what to say—I don’t know what to say!”

“That’s your trouble, Sam; you’re so chicken-hearted you—”

“My father died when I was five, Clara, and no matter what my feelings are to you, there’s no power on earth can make me quit having to be him as well as a son to my mother. Maybe it sounds softy to you—but if I got to pay with her happiness for—ours—then I never want happiness to the day I die.”

“In other words, it’s the mother first.”

“Don’t put it that way—it’s her—age—first. It ain’t what she wants and don’t want; it’s what she’s got to have. My mother couldn’t live away from me.”

“She could if you were called to war.”

There was something electric in the silence that followed, something that seemed to tighten the gaze of each for the other.

“But I haven’t been—yet.”

“The next draft will get you.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, what’ll you do then?”

“That’s something me and ma haven’t ever discussed. The war hasn’t been mentioned in our house for two years—except that the letters don’t come from Germany, and that’s a grief to her. There’s enough time for her to cross that bridge when we come to it. She worries about it enough.”

“If I was a man I’d enlist, I would!”

“I’d give my right hand to. Every other night I dream I’m a lieutenant.”

“Why, there’s not a fellow I know that hasn’t beaten the draft to it and enlisted for the kind of service he wants. I know a half a dozen who have got in the home guard and things and have saved themselves by volunteering from being sent to France.”

“I wouldn’t dodge the front thataway. I’d like to enlist as a private and then work myself up to lieutenant and then on up to captain and get right into the fray on the front. I—”

“You bet, if I was a fellow, I’d enlist for the kind of home service I wanted—that’s what Eddie and all the fellows are doing.”

“So would I, Clara, if I was what you call a—free man. There’s nobody given it more thought than me.”

“Well, then, why don’t you? Talk’s cheap.”

“You know why, Clara, to get back to going around in a circle again.”

“But you’ve got to go, sooner or later. You’ve got a comfortable married sister and independent circumstances of your own to keep your mother; you haven’t got a chance for exemption.”

“I don’t want exemption.”

“Well, then, beat the draft to it.”

“I—Most girls ain’t so anxious to—to get rid of their best fellows, Clara.”

“Silly! Can’t you see the point? If—if you’d enlist and go off to camp, I—I could go and live near you there like Birdie Harberger does her husband. See?”

“You mean—”

“Then—God forbid anything should happen to you!—I’m your wife. You see, Sam?”

“Why, Clara—”

“You see what I mean. But nothing can happen this way, because if you try to enlist in some mechanical department where they need you in this country—you see, Sam? See?”

“I—see.”

“Your mother would have to get used to things then, Sam—it would be the easiest for her. An old lady like her couldn’t go trailing around the outskirts of a camp like your wife could. Think of the comfort it’ll be to her to have me with you if she can’t be. She’ll get so used to—living alone—”

“I—You mustn’t talk that way to me, Clara. When I’m called to serve my country, I’m the first one that will want to go. I’ve given more money already than I can afford to help the boys who are at the front. So far as I’m concerned, enlisting like this with—with you—around, would be the happiest thing ever happened to me, but—well, you see for yourself.”

“You mean, then, you won’t?”

“I mean, Clara, I can’t.”

She was immediately level of tone again and pushed back, placing her folded napkin beside her place, patting it down.

“Well, then, Sam, I’m done.”

“‘Done,’ Clara?”

“Yep. That lets me out. I’ve given you every chance to make this thing possible. Your mother is no better and no different than thousands and thousands of other mothers who are giving their sons, only, she is better off than most, because she’s provided for. It’s all right for a fellow’s mother to come first, maybe, but if his wife isn’t even to come second or third or tenth, then it’s about time to call quits. I haven’t made up my mind to this in a day. I’m done.”

“Clara—”

“Ed has asked me. I don’t pretend he’s my ideal, but he’s more concerned about my future than he is about anybody else’s. If I’m ready to leave with him on that twelve-o’clock train for Boston to-morrow, where he’s going to be put in the clerical corps at Camp Usonis, we’ll be married there to-morrow night, and I’ll settle down somewhere near camp as long as I can. He’s got a good nest-egg if—God forbid!—anything should happen. That’s the whole thing in a nutshell.”

“My God! Clara, this is awful! Eddie Leonard he’s not your kind; he—”

“I’ve given you first chance, Sam. That proves how you stand with me. A one! Ace high! First! Nobody can ever take your place with me. Don’t be a boob coming and going, Sam; you’re one now not to see things and you’ll be another one spelled backward if you don’t help yourself to your chance when it comes. You’ve got your life in front of you, and your mother’s got hers in back of her. Now choose.”

“My God! Clara, this is—terrible! Why—I’d rather be a thousand boobs than take my mother’s heart and tear it to pieces.”

“You won’t?”

“I can’t.”

“Don’t say that, Sam. Go home and—sleep on it. Think it over. Please! Come to your senses, honey. Telephone me at eleven to keep me from catching that twelve-o’clock train. Don’t let me take it with Eddie. Think it over, Sam. Honey—our—future—don’t throw it away! Don’t let me take that twelve-o’clock train!”

There were tears streaming from her eyes, and her lips, so carefully firm, were beginning to tremble. “You can’t blame a girl, Sam, for wanting to provide for her future. Can you, Sam? Think it over. Please! I’ll be praying when eleven o’clock comes to-morrow morning for you to telephone me. Please, Sam—think!”

He dropped his face low, lower toward the table, trembling under the red wave that surged over him and up into the roots of his hair. “I’ll think it over, Clara—my girl—my own girl!”

As if the moments themselves had been woven by her flying amber needles into a whole cloth of meditation, Mrs. Lipkind, beside a kitchen lamp that flowed in gracious light, knitted the long, quiet hours of her evening into fabric, her face screwed and out of repose and occasionally the lips moving. Age is prone to that. Memories love to be mumbled and chewed over—the unconscious kind of articulation which comes with the years and for which youth has a wink and a quirk.

A tiger cat with overfed sides and a stare that seemed to doze purred on the window-ledge, gold and unswerving of eye. The silence was like the singing inside of a shell, and into it rocked Mrs. Lipkind.

By nine o’clock she was already glancing up at the clock, cocking her head to each and every of night’s creaks.

By half after nine there were small and frequent periods of peering through cupped hands down into a street so remote that its traffic had neither shape nor identity. Once she went down a long slit of hallway to the front door, opening it and gazing out upon a fog-filled corridor that was papered in embossed leatherette, one speckled incandescent bulb lighting it sadly. There was something impregnable, even terrible to her in the featureless stare of the doors of three adjoining apartments. She tiptoed, almost ran, poor dear! with the consciousness of some one at her heels, back to the kitchen, where at least was the warm print of the cat’s presence; fell to knitting again, clacking her needles for the solace of explainable sound.

Identically with the round moment of ten Mr. Lipkind entered, almost running down the hallway.

“Hello, ma! Think I got lost? Just got to talking and didn’t realize. Haven’t been worried, ma? Afraid?”

She lifted her head from his kiss. “‘Afraid!’ What you take me for? For why should I be worried at only ten o’clock? Say, I’m glad if you stay out for recreation.”

He kissed her again, shaking out of his coat and unwinding his muffler. “I could just see you walking the floor and looking out of the window.”

“Sa-y, I been so busy all evening I didn’t have time to think. I’m not such a worrier no more like I used to be. Like the saying is—life is too short.”

He drew up beside her, lifting her needles off her work. “Little sweetheart mamma, why don’t you sit on the big sofa in the front room where it’s more comfortable?”

“You can’t make, Sammy, out of a pig’s ear a silk stocking.”

He would detain her hands, his eyes puckered and, so intent upon her.

“You had a good time, Sammy?”

“You’d be surprised, ma, what a nice place Clara boards at.”

“What did they have to eat? Good cooking?”

“Not for a fellow that’s used to my boarding-house.”’

“What?”

“I couldn’t tell if it was soup or finger-bowls they served for the first course.”

“I know—stylish broth. Let me warm you up a little of my thick barley soup that’s left over from—”

He pressed her down. “Please, ma! I’m full up. I couldn’t. They had pink ice-cream, too, with pink cake and—”

“Such mess-food what is bad for you. I’m surprised how Clara keeps her good complexion. Let me fix you some fried—”

“Ma, I tell you I couldn’t. It’s ten o’clock. You mustn’t try to fatten me up so. In war-time a man has got to be lean.”

She sat back suddenly and whitely quiet. “That’s—twice already to-day, Sam, you talk like that.”

He took up her lax hand, moving each separate finger up and down, eyes lowered. “Why not? Doesn’t it ever strike you, mamma, that you and me are—are kidding ourselves along on this war business, pretending to each other there ain’t no war?”

She laid a quick hand to her breast. “What you mean, Sammy?”

“Why, you know what I mean, ma. I notice you read the war news pretty closely, all right.”

“Sammy, you mean something!”

“Now, ma, there’s no need to get excited right away. Think of the mothers who haven’t even got bank-accounts whose sons have got to go.”

“Sammy—you ’ain’t been—”

“No, no; I haven’t.”

“You have! I can see it in your face! You’ve come home with some news to break. You been drafted!”

He held her arms to her sides, still pressing her down to her chair. “I tell you I haven’t! Can’t you take my word for it?”

“Swear to me, Sammy!”

“All right; I swear.”

“Swear to me on your dead father who is an angel in heaven!”

“I swear—thataway.”

She was still pressing against her breathing. “You’re keeping something back. Sammy, is it that we got mail from Germany? From Aunt Carrie? Bad news—O my God!”

“No! No! Who could I get mail from there any more than you’ve been getting it for the last two years? Mamma, if you’re going to be this excitable and get yourself sick, I won’t talk over anything with you. I’ll quit.”

“You got something, Sammy, to break to me. I can read you like a book.”

“I’m done. If I can’t talk facts over with you without your going to pieces this way, I’m done. I quit.”

She clasped her hands, her face pleading up to him. “Sammy, what is it? If you don’t tell me, I can’t stand it. Sammy?”

“Will you sit quiet and not get excited?”

“Please, Sammy, I will.”

“It’s this: you see, ma, the way the draft goes. When a fellow’s called to war, drafted, he’s got to go, no questions asked. But when a fellow enlists for war, volunteers, you see, before the government calls him, then thataway he can pick out for himself the thing he wants to be in the army. Y’see? And then maybe the thing he picks out for himself can keep him right here at home. Y’see, ma—so he don’t have to go away. See the point?”

“You mean when a boy enlists he offers himself instead of gets offered.”

“Exactly.”

“You got something behind all this. You mean you—you want to enlist.”

“Now, ma—you see, if I was to enlist—and stay right here in this country—with you near the camp or, as long as it’s too rough life for you, with—with Clara there—a woman to look in on—”

“Sammy—you mean it’s enlistment!”

Her voice rose in velocity; he could feel her pulse run beneath his fingers.

“It’s the best way, ma. The draft is sure to get me. Let me beat it and keep myself home—near you. We might as well face the music, ma. They’ll get me one way or another. Let me enlist now, ma. Like a man. Right away. For my country!”

Do you know the eyes of Bellini’s “Agony in a Garden”? Can you hear for yourself the note that must have been Cassandra’s when she shouted out her forebodings? There were these now in the glance and voice of Mrs. Lipkind as she drew back from him, her face actually seeming to shrivel.

“No, Sammy! No! No! No!”

“Ma—please—”

“You wouldn’t! You couldn’t! No, Sammy—my son!”

“Ma, for God’s sake don’t go on so!”

“Then tell me you wouldn’t! Against your own flesh and blood! Tell me you wouldn’t!”

“No, no, ma! For God’s sake, don’t take a fit—a stroke—no, no; I wouldn’t—I wouldn’t!”

“Your own blood, Sammy! Your own baby cousins what I tucked you in bed with—mine own sister’s children! Her babies what slept with you. Mine own sister who raised me and worked down her hands to the bone to make it so with my young husband and baby we could come to America—no—no!”

“Mamma, for God’s sakes—”

“Three years like a snake here inside of it’s eating me—all night—all day—I’m a good American, Sammy; I got so much I should be thankful for to America. Twenty-five years it’s my home, the home where I had prosperity and good treatment, the home where I had happiness with your papa and where he lies buried, but I can’t give you to fight against my own, Sammy—to be murdered by your own—my sister what never in her life harmed a bird—my child and her children—cousins—against each other. My beautiful country what I remember with cows and green fields and clover—always the smell of clover. It ain’t human to murder against your own flesh and blood for God knows what reason!”

“Mamma, there is a reason it—”

“I tell you I’m a good American, Sammy. For America I give my last cent, but not to stick knives in my own—it ain’t human—Why didn’t I die before we got war? What good am I here? In my boy’s way for his country—his marriage—his happiness—why don’t I die?”

“Ma, I tell you you mustn’t! You’re making yourself sick. Let me fan you. Here, ma, I didn’t mean it. See—I’m holding you tight. I won’t never let go. You’re my little sweetheart mamma. You mustn’t tremble like that. I’m holding you tight—tight—little mamma.”

“My boy! My little boy! My son! My all! All in their bed together. Three. Her two. Mine. The smell of clover—my boy—Sammy—Sam—” She fainted back into his arms suddenly, very white and very quiet and very shriveled.

He watched beside her bed the next five hours of the night, his face so close above hers that, when she opened her eyes, his were merged into one for her, and the clasp of his hand never left hers.

“You all right, ma? Sure? Sure you don’t need the doctor?”

She looked up at him with a tired, a burned-out, an ashamed smile. “The first time in my life, Sammy, such a thing ever happened to me.”

He pressed a chain of close kisses to the back of her hand, his voice far from firm. “It was me, ma. I’ll never forgive myself. My little mamma, my little mamma sweetheart!”

“I feel fine, son; only, with you sitting here all night, you don’t let me sleep for worry that you ain’t in bed.”

“I love it. I love to sit here by you and watch you sleep. You’re sure you’ve no fever? Sure?”

“I’m well, Sammy. It was nothing but what you call a fainting-fit. For some women it’s nothing that they should faint every time they get a little bit excited. It’s nothing. Feel my hands—how cool! That’s always a sign—coolness.”

He pressed them both to his lips, blowing his warm breath against them.

“There now—go to sleep.”

The night-light burning weakly, the great black-walnut bedstead ponderous in the gloom, she lay there mostly smiling and always shamefaced.

“Such a thing should happen to me at my age!”

“Try to sleep, ma.”

“Go in your room to bed, and then I get sleep. Do you want your own clerks should beat you to business to-morrow?”

“A little whisky?”

“Go away; you got me dosed up enough with such Schnapps.”

“The light lower?”

“No. If you don’t go in your room, I lay here all night with my eyes open, so help me!”

He rose, stiff and sore-kneed, hair awry, and his eyes with the red rims of fatigue. “You’ll sure ring the little bell if you want anything, ma?”

“Sure.”

“You promise you won’t get up to fix breakfast.”

“If I don’t feel good, I let you fix mine.”

“Good night, little sweetheart mamma.”

“You ain’t—mad at me, Sam?”

“Mad! Why, ma, you mustn’t ask me a—a thing like that; it just kills me to hear you. Me that’s not even fit to black your shoes! Mad at you? Why, I—I—Good night—good—night—ma.”

---

At just fifteen minutes before seven, to the pungency of coffee and the harsh sing of water across the hall, Mrs. Lipkind in a fuzzy wrapper the color of her eyes and hair, kissed her son awake.

“Sam! Sammy! Get up! Thu, thu! I can’t get him up in the morning!”

The snuggle away and into the crotch of his elbow.

“Sam-my—quarter to seven!”

He sprang up then, haggard, but in a flood of recollection and remorse. “Ma, I must ‘a’ dropped off at the last minute. You all right? What are you doing up? Go right back! Didn’t I tell you not to get up?”

“I been up an hour already; that’s how fine I feel. Get up, Sammy; it’s late.”

He flung on his robe, trying to withdraw her from the business of looping back the bed-clothing over the footboard and pounding into the pillows.

“I tell you I won’t have it! You got to lay in bed this morning.”

“I’m all right, Sammy. Wouldn’t I say so if I wasn’t?” But she sat down rather weakly on the edge of the bed, holding the right side of her, breathing too hard.

“I—I shouldn’t have beat that pillow is all. Let me get my breathing. I’m all right.” Nevertheless, she let him relax her to his pillow, draw the covers down from the footboard, and cover her.

“This settles it,” he said, quietly. “I’m going to get a doctor.”

She caught his hand. “If—if you want to get me excited for sure, just you call a doctor—now—before I talk with you a minute—I want to talk—I’m all right, Sammy, if you let me talk to you. One step to that telephone, and I get excited—”

“Please, ma—”

“Sammy?”

“Yes.”

“Will you listen to me and do like I want it?”

“Yes.”

“I—been a bad old woman.”

“That’s right—break my heart.”

“I got a brave boy for a son, and I want to make from him a coward.”

“Ma—please!”

“I laid saying to myself all night, a mother should have such a son like mine and make things hard for him yet!”

“Please, get it all out of your head—”

“From America what has given to me everything I should hold back my son from fighting for. In war, it ain’t your own flesh and blood what counts; it’s the flesh and blood of your country—not, Sam? I been thinking only it’s my family affair. If God lets be such a terrible thing like war, there is somewhere a good reason for it. I want you to enlist, Sammy, for your country. Not for in an office, but for where they need you. I want you to enlist to get some day to be such a lieutenant and a captain like you used to play it with tin soldiers. I want—”

“Mamma, mamma, you know you don’t mean it!”

“I want it, I tell you. All night I worked on it how dumb I’ve been, not right away to see it—last night. With Clara near you in the camp—”

“Ma, I didn’t mean it that way; I—”

“Clara near you for a woman to look in on, I been so dumb not to right away see it. I’m glad you let it out, Sam. I wouldn’t take five thousand dollars it didn’t happen—I feel fine—I want it—I—”

“I didn’t mean it, ma—I swear! Don’t rub it in this way—please—please—”

“Why, I never wanted anything in my life like I want this, Sammy—that you should enlist—a woman to look in on—I been a bad woman, Sammy, I—I—oh—”

It was then that Mr. Lipkind tore to the telephone, his hands so frenzied that they would not properly hold the receiver.

At eight o’clock, and without even a further word, Mrs. Lipkind breathed out quietly, a little tiredly, and yet so eloquent of eye. To her son, pleading there beside her for the life she had not left to give, it was as if the swollen bosom of some stream were carrying her rapidly but gently down its surface, her gaze back at him and begging him to stay the current.

“Mamma! Darling! Doctor—please—for God’s sakes—please—she wants something—-she can’t say it—give it to her! Try to make her tell me what she wants—she wants something—this is terrible—don’t let her want something—mamma—just one word to me—try—try—O my God—Doctor—”

A black arm then reached down to withdraw him from the glazed stare which had begun to set in from the pillow.

By ten o’clock a light snow had set in, blowing almost horizontally across the window-pane. He sat his second hour there in a rather forward huddle beside the drawn shade of that window, the sotto-voce comings and goings, all the black-coated parvenus that follow the wake of death, moving about him. A clock shaped like a pilot’s wheel, a boyhood property which had marked the time of twenty years, finally chimed the thin, tin stroke of eleven and after a swimming, nebulous interval, twelve. He glanced up each time with his swollen eyes, and then almost automatically out to the wall telephone in the hall opposite the open door. But he did not move. In fact, for two more hours sat there impervious to proffered warmth of word or deed. Meanwhile, the snow behind the drawn shade had turned to rain that beat and washed against the pane.

Just so the iciness that had locked Samuel Lipkind seemed suddenly to melt in a tornado of sobs that swept him, felled him into a prostration of the terrible tears that men weep.

At a training-camp—somewhere—from his side of a tent that had flapped like a captive wing all through a wind-swept night, Lieutenant Lipkind stirred rather painfully for a final snuggle into the crotch of an elbow that was stiff with chill and night damp.

Out over the peaked city that had been pitched rather than built, and on beyond over the frozen stubble of fields, sounded the bugle-cry of the reveille, which shrills so potently:

I can’t get ’em up; I can’t get ’em up;
     I can’t get ’em up in the morn—ing!

Notes

1 Black wig worn by orthodox Jewish women after marriage.