"Yes."

"Grand!"

"And look over those roofs! It seems like there's a million stars shining, don't it?"

"You're like me, Miss Renie; so many times I've noticed it. Nothing is so grand to me as nature, neither."

"Up at Green Springs, in the Ozarks, where we went for ten days last summer, honest, Mr. Hochenheimer, I used to lie looking out the window all night. The stars up there shone so close it seemed like you could nearly touch them."

"Ain't that wonderful, Miss Renie, you should be just like me again!" She smiled in the dark. "When I was a boy always next to the attic window I liked to sleep. When I built my house, Miss Renie, the first thing after I designed my rose-garden I drew up for myself a sleeping-garden on my roof. The architects fussed enough about spoiling the roof-line, but that's one of the things I wanted which I stood pat for and got—my sleeping-garden."

"Sleeping-garden!"

"Miss Renie, I just wish you could see it—all laid out in roses in summer, and a screened-in pergola, where I sleep, right underneath the stars and roses. I sleep so close to heaven I always say I can smell it."

She turned her little face, white as a spray of jasmine against a dark background of night, toward him. "Underneath a pergola of roses! I guess it's the roses you must smell. How grand!"

"Sometimes when—if you come to Cincinnati I want to show you my place, Miss Renie. If I say so myself, I got a wonderful garden; flowers I can show you grown from clippings from every part of the world. If I do say so, for a sausage-maker who never went to school two years in his life it ain't so bad. I got a lily-pond, Miss Renie, they come from all over to see. By myself I designed it."

"It must be grand, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"On Sunday, Miss Renie, I like for my boys and girls from the factory to come up to my place and make themselves at home. You should see my old mother how she fixes for them! I wish you could see them boys and girls, and old men and women. In a sausage-factory they don't get much time to listen to birds and water when it falls into a fountain. I wish, Miss Renie, you could see them with the flowers. I—well, I don't know how to say it; but I wish you could see them for yourself."

"They like it?"

"Like it! I tell you it's the greatest pleasure I get out of my place. I wish, instead of my fine house, the city would let me build my factory for them right in the garden."

"On such a stylish street they wouldn't ever let you, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"Me and my mother ain't much for style, Miss Renie. Honest, you'd be surprised, but with my fine house I don't even keep an automobile. My mother, she's old, Miss Renie, and won't go in one. Alone it ain't no pleasure; and when I don't walk down to my factory the street-cars is good enough."

"You should take it easier, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"All our lives, Miss Renie, we've been so busy, my mother and me, I tell her we got to be learnt—like children got to be learnt to walk—how to enjoy ourselves. We—we need somebody young—somebody like you in the house, Miss Renie—young and so pretty, and full of life, and—and so sweet."

She gave a gauzy laugh. "Honest, it must seem like a dream to have a rose-garden right on the place you live."

"I wish you could see, Miss Renie, a new Killarney my gardener showed me in the hothouse yesterday before I left—white-and-pink blend; he got the clipping from Jamaica. It's a pale pink in the heart like the first minute when the sun rises; and then it gets pinker and pinker toward the outside petals, till it just bursts out as red as the sun when it's ready to set."

"And those beautiful little tan roses you sent me, Mr. Hochenheimer; I—"

"Ah, Miss Renie, the clipping from those sunset roses comes from Italy; but now I call them Renie Roses, if—if you'll excuse me. I tell you, Miss Renie, you look just enough like 'em to be related. Little satiny gold-looking roses, with a pink blush on the inside of the petals and a—a few little soft thorns on the stem."

"Aw, Mr. Hochenheimer, I ain't got thorns."

Out from the velvet shadows his face came closer. "It's thorns to me, Miss Renie, because you're so pretty and sweet, and—and seem so far away from a—plain fellow like me."

"I—"

"I'm a plain man, Miss Renie, and I don't know how to talk much about the things I feel inside of me; but—but I feel, all-righty."

"Looks ain't everything."

"I tell you, Miss Renie, now since I can afford it, I just don't seem to know how to do the things I got the feeling inside of me for. Even in my grand house sometimes I feel like it—it's too late for me to live like I feel."

"Nothing's ever too late, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"Just since I met you I can feel that way, Miss Renie, if you'll excuse me for saying it—just since I met you."

"Me?"

"For the first time in my life, Miss Renie, I got the feeling from a girl that, for me, life—maybe my life—is just beginning. Like a vine, Miss Renie, you got yourself tangled round my feelings."

"Oh, Mr. Hochenheimer!"

"Like I told your papa to-night on the car, I 'ain't got much to offer a beautiful young girl like you; money, I can see, don't count for so much with a fine girl like you, and I—I don't need to be told that my face and my ways ain't my fortune."

"It's the heart that counts, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"If—if you mean that, Miss Renie—if love, just love, can bring happiness, I can make for you a life as beautiful as my rose-garden. For the first time in my life, Miss Renie, I got the feeling I can do that for a woman—and that woman is you. I—Will you—will you be my wife, Miss Renie?" She could feel his breath now, scorching her cheek. "Will you, Miss Renie?"

And even as she leaned over to open her lips a figure, swift as a Greek, dashed to the veranda—up the steps three at a bound.

"Renie!"

"Izzy!" She rose, pushing back her chair, and her hand flew to her breast.

"Just a minute. Inside I gotta see you quick, Renie. Howdy, Hochenheimer? You excuse her a minute. I got to see her."

His voice was like wine that sings in the pouring.

"Yes, yes, Izzy; I'm coming." Hers was trembling and pizzicato. "Excuse me a minute, Mr. Hochenheimer—a minute."

Mr. Hochenheimer rose, mopping his brow. "It's all right, Miss Renie. I wait out here on the porch till it pleases you."

In her tiny bedroom, with the light turned up, she faced her brother; and he grasped her shoulders so that, through the sheer texture of her dress, his hands left red prints on the flesh.

"Renie, you 'ain't done it, have you?"

"No, no, Izzy; I've done nothing. Where you been?"

He gave a great laugh and sank into a chair, limp. "You don't have to, Renie. It's all right! I've fixed it. Everything is all right!"

"What do you mean?"

Then, as though the current of his returning vigor could know no bounds, he scooped her in a one-armed embrace that fairly raised her from the floor.

"All of a sudden, when you went out, Renie, I remembered Aunt Becky. You remember she was the one who made Uncle Isadore fork over to papa that time about the mortgage?"

"Yes, yes."

"All of a sudden it came over me that she was the only one who could do anything with him. I ran over to the house—all the way I ran, Renie. She was up in her room, and—and it's all right, Renie. I told her, and she's fixed it—fixed it!"

"Oh, Izzy!"

"She's fixed it. When he came home to supper we got him right away up in her room before he had his hat off. Like a mother she begged for me, Renie—like a mother. God! I—I tell you I couldn't go through it again; but she got him, Renie—she got him!"

"Go on, Izzy—go on!"

"She told him I wouldn't face the shame; she told him I—I'd kill my own father, and that the blood would be on his hands; she told him if he'd let me go to the devil without another chance—me that had been named after him—that a curse would roost on his chest. He didn't want to give in to her—he didn't want to; but she scared him, and she's a woman and she knew how to get inside of him—she knew how. They're going to send me out to his mines, where I can start over, Renie. Out West, where it'll make a new man of me; where I can begin over—start right, Renie. Start right!"

"Oh, Izzy darling!"

"I can pay up when I earn the money like a man, Renie. It would have killed me if you had sold yourself to him for me. I'd have gone to the stripes first. But I got a man's chance now, Renie, and I don't have to do that rotten thing to you and Squash. A man's chance, Renie, and—and I'm going to take it."

She sat down on the bed suddenly, as though the blood had flowed out of her heart, weakening her.

"A sister like you that would have stuck; and—and I'm going to make good to a sister like you, Renie. I am, this time. Please believe me, Renie. I am! I am!"

Her hand lay pressed to his cheek and she could feel the warm course of his tears. "Izzy, I knew you wasn't yellow; I—I knew you wasn't."

Sobs shook him suddenly and he buried his face in the pillow beside her.

"Why, Izzy! Why, Izzy darling, what—what is it, Izzy darling?"

"It's nothing. You—you get out, Renie. I'm all right; only—only it's—it's—Now that it's all over, I—I—Just let me alone a minute, Renie. Go—you—please—please!"

She closed the door behind her and fumbled through the gloom of the hallway, her hand faltering as she groped ahead.

From the recesses of the moonflower vine Mr. Hochenheimer rose to meet her; and, because her limbs would tremble, she slid quickly into her chair.

"You—you must excuse me, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"It's all right, Miss Renie. I take up where we left off. It ain't so easy, Miss Renie, to begin all over again to say it, but—but will you be my—will you be my—"

She was suddenly in his arms, burrowing against the speckled waistcoat a little resting-place for her head.



IN MEMORIAM

Toward the city Mother Earth turns a plate-glass eye and an asphalt bosom. The rhythm of her heart-beats does not penetrate through paved streets. That cadence is for those few of her billion children who have stayed by to sleep with an ear to the mossy floor of her woodlands. The prodigals, the future Tammany leaders, merchant princes, cotton kings, and society queens march on, each to an urban destiny.

Nor is the return of the prodigal to Mother Earth along a piked highway. The road back to Nature is full of her own secrets, and few who have trod the streets of the city remember the brambled return, or care.

Men who know to the centime each fluctuation of the wheat-market have no eye for the tawny beauty of a whole field of the precious product fluctuating to a breeze. Women stayed by steel and convention into the mold of form love the soft faces of flowers looking up at them from expensive corsages, but care not for their nativity. Greeks, first of men, perched their gods up on Olympus and wandered down to build cities.

Because the city is as insidious as the sleeping-draught of an Indian soothsayer, under its spell men go mad for gain and forget that to stand on the brow of a mountain at night, arms outstretched in kinship to Vega and Capella, is a golden moment of purer alloy than certified bonds. What magnate remembers where the best tackle squirms, or the taste of grass sucked in from the tender end of the blade? All progress is like that. How immediately are the yesterdays metamorphosed into memories; and memories, even the stanchest of them, mold and disintegrate.

There were times when Mrs. Simon Meyerburg, who was threescore and ten years removed from the days when her bare feet had run fleet across a plushy meadow, would pause, hand on brow, when a memory, perhaps moving as it crumpled, would pass before her in faded daguerreotype. A gallery of events—so many pictures faded from her mental walls that the gaps seemed, as it were, to separate her from herself, making of her and that swift-footed girl back there vague strangers. And yet the vivid canvases! A peasant child at a churn, switching her black braids this way and that when they dangled too far over her shoulders; a linnet dead in its cage outside a thatched doorway, and the taste of her first heart tears; a hand-made crib in a dark corner and hardly ever empty of a little new-comer.

Then gaps, except here and there a faded bit. Then again large memories close and full of color: Simon Meyerburg, with the years folded back and youth on him, wooing her beside a stile that led off a South German country road, his peasant cap fallen back off his strong black curls, and even then a seer's light in his strong black eyes. Her own black eyes more diffident now and the black braids looped up and bound in a tight coronet round her head. The voice of the mother calling her homeward through cupped hands and in the Low Dutch of the Lowlands. A moonrise and the sweet, vivid smell of evening, and once more the youth Simon Meyerburg wooing her there beside the roadside stile.

The crowded steerage of a wooden ship, her first son suckling at her breast. At the prow Simon Meyerburg again, his peasant cap pushed backward and his black eyes, with the seer's light in them, gleaming ahead for the first glimpse of the land of fulfilment. An unbelievable city sucking them immediately into its slums. Filth. A quick descent into squalor. A second son. A third. A fourth. A fifth. A girl child. Mouths too eager for black bread. Always the struggle and the sour smell of slums. Finally light. White light. The seer sees!

Then, ever green in her mind, a sun-mottled kitchen with a black iron range, and along the walls festoons of looped-up green peppers. White bread now in abundance for small mouths not so hungry. At evening, Simon Meyerburg, with rims of dirt under his nails, entering that kitchen door, the girl child turning from her breast to leap forward....

Sometimes in her stately halls, caught, as it were, in passing from room to room, Mrs. Simon Meyerburg would pause, assaulted by these memories of days so remote that her mind could not always run back to meet them. Then again the glittering present studded with the jewels of fulfilment lay on her brow like the thin line of a headache, pressing out the past.

In Mrs. Meyerburg's bedroom a great arched ceiling, after the narrative manner of Paolo Veronese, lent such vastness to the apartment that moving across it, or sitting in her great overstuffed armchair beside a window, she hardly struck a note. Great wealth lay in canopied silence over that room. A rug out of Persia, so large that countless extra years and countless pairs of tired eyes and tired fingers had gone to make it, let noises sink noiseless into its nap. Brocade and tufting ate up sound. At every window more brocade shut out the incessant song of the Avenue.

In the overstuffed chair beside one of these windows sat Mrs. Meyerburg with her hands idle and laid out along the chair sides. They were ringless hands and full of years, with a great network of veins across their backs and the aging fingers large at the knuckles. But where the hands betrayed the eyes belied. Deep in Mrs. Meyerburg's soft and scarcely flabby face her gaze was straight and very black.

An hour by an inlaid ormolu clock she sat there, her feet in soft, elastic-sided shoes, just lifted from the floor. Incongruous enough, on a plain deal table beside her, a sheaf of blue-prints lay unrolled. She fingered them occasionally and with a tenderness, as if they might be sensitive to touch; even smiled and held the sheets one by one up against the shrouded window so that the light pressing through them might emphasize the labyrinth of lines. Dozed, with a smile printed on her lips, and awoke when her head lopped too heavily sidewise.

After an interval she slid out of her chair and crossed to the door; even in action her broad, squat figure infinitesimal to the room's proportions. When she opened the door the dignity of great halls lay in waiting. She crossed the wide vista to a closed door, a replica of her own, and knocked, waited, turned the crystal knob, knocked, waited. Rapped again, this time in three staccatos. Silence. Then softly and with her cheek laid against the imperturbable panel of the closed door:

"Becky! Becky! Open! Open!"

A muffled sound from within as if a sob had been let slip.

Then again, rattling the knob this time: "Becky, it's mamma. Becky, you should get up now; it's time for our drive. Let me in, Becky. Open!" shaking the handle.

When the door opened finally, Mrs. Meyerburg stepped quickly through the slit, as if to ward off its too heavy closing. A French maid, in the immemorial paraphernalia of French maids, stood by like a slim sentinel on stilts, her tall, small heels clicked together. Perfume lay on the artificial dusk of that room.

"Therese, you can go down awhile. When Miss Becky wants she can ring."

"Oui, madame."

"I wish, Therese, when you go down you would tell Anna I don't want she should put the real lace table-cloth from Miss Becky's party last night in the linen-room. Twice I've told her after its use she should always bring it right back to me."

"Oui, madame." And Therese flashed out on the slim heels.

In the crowded apartment, furnished after the most exuberant of the various exuberant French periods, Miss Rebecca Meyerburg lay on a Louis Seize bed, certified to have been lifted, down to the casters, from the Grand Trianon of Marie Antoinette. In a great confusion of laces and linens, disarrayed as if tossed by a fever patient, she lay there, her round young arm flung up over her head and her face turned downward to the curve of one elbow.

"Ach, now, Becky, ain't it a shame you should take on so? Ain't it a shame before the servants? Come, baby, in a half-hour it's time for our drive. Come, baby!"

Beneath the fine linen Miss Meyerburg dug with her toes into the mattress, her head burrowing deeper and the black mane of her hair rippling backward in maenadic waves. "If you don't let me alone, ma, if you don't just let me lay here in peace, I'll scream. I'll faint. Faint, I tell you," and smothered her words in the curve of her elbow.

Mrs. Meyerburg breathed outward in a sigh and sat down hesitant on the bed edge, her hand reaching out to the bare white shoulder and smoothing its high luster.

"Come, Becky, and get up like a good girl. Don't you want, baby, to come over by mamma's room and see the plans for the Memorial?"

"No! No! No!"

"They got to be sent back to-day, Becky, before Goldfinger leaves for Boston with them. I got to get right away busy if I want the boys should have their surprise this time next year. To no one but my baby girl have I said yet one word. Don't you want, Becky, to see them before they go down by Goldfinger's office, so he can right away go ahead?"

"No! No!"

"Becky, ain't you ashamed, your own papa's Memorial?"

"Please, mamma, please. If you only won't Becky me."

"Betty."

"If you only will go and—and leave me alone."

"I ask you, Betty, should a girl what's got everything that should make her happy just like an angel, a girl what has got for herself heaven on earth, make herself right away sick the first time what things don't go smooth with her?"

"If I could only die! If I could die! Why don't I die to-day?"

The throb of a sob lay on her voice, and she sat up suddenly, pushing backward with both hands the thick rush of hair to her face. Grief had blotched her cheeks, but she was as warm and as curving as Flora. It was as if her deep-white flesh was deep-white plush and would sink to the touch. The line and the sheen of her radiated through her fine garment.

"Why don't I die?" repeating her vain question, and her eyes, darker because she was so white, looking out and past her parent and streaming their bitter tears.

"You'm a bad girl, Becky, and it's a sin you should talk so. Gott sei dank your poor papa ain't alive to hear such bad words from his own daughter's lips."

"If pa was living things would be different—let me tell you that."

In a flare of immediate anger Mrs. Meyerburg's head shot forward. "Du—" she cried; "du—you—you bad girl—du—"

"If he had lived they would!"

Suddenly Mrs. Meyerburg's face, with the lines in it held tight, relaxed to tears and she fell to rocking herself softly to and fro, her stiff silk shushing as she swayed.

"Ach, that I should live to hear from my own child that I 'ain't done by her like her father would want that I should do. Every hour since I been left alone, to do by my six children like he would want has been always my only thought, and now—"

"I mean it! I mean it! If he had lived he would have settled it on me easy enough when he saw what I was doing for the family. Two million if need be! He was the one in this family that made it big, because he wasn't afraid of big things."

Further rage trembled along Mrs. Meyerburg's voice, and the fingers she waggled trembled, too, of that same wrath. "You'm a bad girl, Becky! You'm a bad girl with thought only for yourself. Always your papa said by each child we should do the same. Five hundred thousand dollars to each son when he marries a fine, good girl. More as one night I can tell you I laid awake when Felix picked out for himself Trixie, just wondering what papa would want I should do it or not."

"Can't you keep from picking on that girl, mamma? It's through her, if you want to know it, that I first got in with—with the marquis and that crowd."

"Always by each child we should do the same, he said. Five hundred thousand dollars to our girl when she marries a fine, good man. Even back in days when he had not a cent to leave after him, always he said alike you should all be treated. Always, you hear? Always."

Fire had dried the tears in Mrs. Meyerburg's eyes and her face had resumed its fixity of lines. Only her finger continued to tremble and two near-the-surface nerves in her left temple.

"But, mamma, you know yourself he never dreamt we could climb up to this. That for a miserable five hundred thousand more we—"

"A miserable five hundred thousand she calls it like it was five hundred thousand cents!"

"That for a miserable five hundred thousand dollars we could raise our family up to the nobility. The Marquis Rosencrantz, ma, who—"

"Becky, it ain't that I got a word to say against this young man Rosencrantz—but—"

"Marquis Rosencrantz, mamma."

"All right then, Marquis Rosencrantz; but it's like your brother Ben says—a marquis in a country where there ain't no more any of them made could just as well be called a mister. Not a word I got to say against this young Rosencrantz, but—"

"Marquis, ma, please remember! M-a-r-q-u-i-s. Whether there are any more of them or not in France, he still goes by the title over here, and that's what he is, ma. Please remember!"

"Marquis Rosencrantz. But when a young man, Becky, don't talk my own language, it ain't so easy for me to know if I like him—"

"Like him. Huh!" Sitting there upright in bed, her large, white arms wrapped about her knees, Miss Meyerburg regarded her mother with dry eyes, but through a blur of scorn. "She don't know if she likes him! Let me tell you, ma, we can worry if he likes us, not if we like him."

"I always say, Becky, about these fine people what you meet traveling in Europe with your brother Felix and his wife with her gay ways, you—"

"A marquis comes her way and she don't know whether she likes him or not. That's rich!"

"For the price what you say he hinted to you last night he's got to have before he can get married, I guess oser I can say if I like him or not."

"I should think, ma, if you had any pride for the family after the way we've been spit on by a certain bunch in this town, you'd be glad to grab a marquis to wave in their stuck-up faces."

"For such things what make in life men like wild beasts fighting each other I got no time. I ain't all for style. All what I want is to see my little girl married to a fine, good—"

"Yes, yes, ma. I know all that fine, good man stuff."

"Ja, I say it again. To a fine, good man just like nearly all your brothers married fine, good women."

"The marquis, just let me tell you, ma, is a man of force—he is. Maybe those foreigners don't always show up, but I've seen him on his own ground. I've seen him in Paris and Monte Carlo and I—"

"I 'ain't got a word to say against this young man what followed you all the way home from Paris. What I don't know I can't talk about. Only I ask you, Becky, ain't it always in the papers how from Europe they run here thick after the girls what have got money?"

"What are you always running down Europe for, ma? Where did you come from, yourself, I'd like to know!"

"I don't run it down, baby. I don't. You know how your papa loved the old country and sent always money back home. But he always said, baby, it's in America we had all our good luck and to America what gave us so much we should give back too. Just because your brother Felix and his wife what was on the stage like such doings over there is no reason—"

"It's just those notions of yours, ma, that are keeping this family down, let me tell you that—you and Ben and Roody and Izzy and all the rest of them with their old-fogyness."

"Your brothers, let me tell you, you bad girl, you, are as fine, steady men as your papa before them."

"We could have one of the biggest names in this town and get in on the right kind of charities, if you and they didn't—"

"Your papa, Becky, had his own ideas how to do charity and how we should not give just where our name shows big in the papers. Your brothers are like him, fine, good men, and that's why I want the Memorial should come like a surprise, so they can have before them always that their father was the finest—"

Suddenly Miss Meyerburg flung herself back on her pillows, tears gushing hot and full of salt. "Oh, what's the use? What's the use? She won't understand."

"Becky, baby, 'ain't you got everything what money can buy? A house on Fifth Avenue what even the sight-seeing automobile hollers out about. Automobiles of your own more as you can use. Brothers nearly all with grand wives and families, and such a beautiful girl like you with a grand fortune to—"

"Mamma, mamma, can't you understand there's things that money can't buy?"

"Ja, I should say so; but them is the things, Becky, that money makes you forget all about."

"Try to understand, can't you, ma, that the Rosencrantzes are a great old French family. You know for yourself how few of—of our people got titles to their names. Jacob Rosencrantz, ma, the marquis's great-grandfather back in the days when the family had big money, got his title from the king, ma, for lending money when the—"

"If all of his sons got, like this great-grandson of his asks, one million dollars with their wives, I should say he could afford to lend to the king. To two kings!"

"Please, mamma, can't you understand? It don't hurt how things are now—it's the way they used to be with those kinds of families that count, ma. I was on their estate in France, ma, with Trixie and Felix. She used to know him in Paris when she was singing there. You ought to see, ma, an old, old place that you can ride on for a day and not come to the end, and the house so moldy and ramshackly that any American girl would be proud to marry into it. Those are the things, ma, that our family needs and money can't buy."

"You mean, Becky, that five hundred thousand dollars can't buy it! It has got to be a million dollars yet! A million dollars my child asks for just like it was five dollars!"

"I'm not asking that, ma, I'm not. Five hundred thousand of it is mine by rights. I'm only asking for half a million."

"Gott in Himmel, child, much more as a million dollars I 'ain't got left altogether. With my five sons married and their shares drawn, I tell you, Becky, a million dollars to you now would leave me so low that—"

"There you go. That's what you said that time Felix had to have the hundred thousand in a hurry, but I notice you got it overnight without even turning a finger. For him you can do, but—"

"For a black sheep I got to—"

"It's not all tease with the boys, let me tell you, ma, when they sing that song at you about a whole stocking full you've got that none of us know anything about."

"Ja, you and your brothers can talk, but I know what's what. Don't think, Becky, your brother Felix and his wife with their Monte Carlo all the time and a yacht they got to have yet, and their debts, 'ain't eat a piece out of the fortune your papa built up for you children out of his own sweat."

"Don't go back to ancient history, ma."

"Those cut-uppings is for billionaires, Becky; not for one old lady as 'ain't got much more as a million left after her six dowries is paid."

"Yes, I wish I had what you've got over and above that."

"That young Rosencrantz is playing you high, Becky, because he sees how high your brother and his wife can fly. Always when people get big like us, right away the world takes us for even bigger as we are. He 'ain't got no right to make such demands. Five hundred thousand dollars is more as he ever saw in his life. I tell you, Becky, if I could speak to that young man like you can in his own language, I would tell him what—"

"He don't make demands in so many words, ma. There—there's a way those things are done without just coming right out. I guess you think, when Selma Bernheimer married her baron, he came right out in words and said it had to be two millions. Like fun he did! But just the same, you don't think she could have said yes to him, when he asked her, unless she knew that she—she could fork over, do you?"

"I tell you in such marriages the last thing what you hear talked about is being in love."

"Oh, that had nothing to do with this, ma. The love part is there all right. You—you don't understand, ma!"

"Gott sei dank that I don't understand such!"

Then Miss Meyerburg leaned forward, her large, white hand on her parent's knee, her face close and full of fervor. "Ma dear, you got it in your power sitting there to make me the happiest girl in the world. I'll do more for the family in this marriage, ma dear, than all five of the boys put together. I tell you, ma, it's the biggest minute in the life of this family if you give—if you do this for me, ma. It is, dear."

"Ja, let me just tell you that your brothers and their wives will be the first to put their foot down on that the youngest should get twice as much as they."

"What do you care? And, anyways, ma, they don't need to know. What they don't know don't hurt them. Don't tell them, ma; just don't tell them. Ain't I the only girl, and the baby too? Haven't I got the chance to, raise them all up in society? Oh, ma dear, you've got so much! So much more than you can ever use, and—and you—you're old now, ma, and I—I'm so young, dear, so young!"

"Ja, like you say, maybe I'm old, but I tell you, Becky, I 'ain't got the money to throw away like—"

"Let me let the marquis ask me when he comes to-night, ma. He's ready to pop if—if I just dare to let him, ma."

"Gott in Himmel, I tell you how things is done now'days between young people. I should let him ask her yet, she says, like I had put on his mouth a muzzle."

"It's no use letting him ask me, ma dear, if I can't come across like I know the girl he can marry has got to. Let me let him ask me to-night, ma. And to-morrow at New-Year's dinner with all the family here, we'll break it to 'em, ma. Mamma dearie! Let me ask the marquis here to New-Year's dinner to-morrow to meet his new brothers. Ma dearie!"

She was frankly pleading, her eyes twilit, with stars shining through, her mouth so like red fruit and her beautiful brows raised.

"So help me, Becky, if I give you the million like you ask and with the Memorial yet to build, I am wiped out, Becky. Wiped out!"

"Wiped out! With five sons with their finger in every good pie in town and a daughter married into nobility?"

"I 'ain't got one word to say against my children, Becky; luckier I been as most mothers; but the day what I am dependent on one of them for my living, that day I want I should be done with living."

"You could live with us, ma dearie. Paris in season and the estate in winter. You—you could run the big estate for us, ma, order and—"

"You heard what I said, Becky."

"Well, then, ma, why—why don't you get the Memorial out of your head, dear? Pa built his own Memorial, ma. His memory lasts with everybody, anyway."

Aspen trembling laid hold of Mrs. Meyerburg, muddling her words. "You—ach—from her dead father yet she would take away the marble to his memory."

"Ma!"

"Ja, the marble to his memory! Bad girl, you! A man what lifted up with his hands those that came after so that hardly on the ground they got to put a foot. And now du—du what gives him no thanks! A Memorial to her papa, a Home for the Old and Poor what he always dreamed of building, she begrudges, she begrudges!"

"No, no, mamma, you don't understand!"

"A man what loved so the poor while he lived, shouldn't be able to do for the poor after he is dead too. You go, you bad girl you, to your grand nobleman what won't take you if you ain't worth every inch your weight in gold, you—"

"Mamma—mamma, if you don't stop your terrible talk I—I'll faint, I tell you!"

"You go and your brother Felix and his fine wife with you, for the things what money can buy. You got such madness for money, sometimes like wolfs you all feel to me breathing on my back, you go and—"

"I tell you if—if you don't stop that terrible talk I—I'll faint, I will! Oh, why don't I die—why—why—why?"

"Since the day what he died every hour I've lived for the time when, with my children provided for, I could spend the rest of my days building to a man what deserved it such a monument as he should have. A Home for the Old and Poor with a park all around, where they can sit all day in the sun. All ready I got the plans in my room to send them down by Goldfinger this afternoon he should go right ahead and—"

"Mamma, mamma, please listen—"

But the voice of Mrs. Meyerburg rose like a gale and her face was slashed with tears. "If my last cent it takes and on the streets I go to beg, up such a Memorial goes. All you children with your feet up on his shoulders can turn away from his memory now he's gone, but up it goes if on the day what I die I got to dig dirt with my finger-nails to pay yet for my coffin."

"Listen, ma; just be calm a minute—just a minute. I don't mean that. Didn't I just say he was the grandest father in the world and—"

"You said—"

"'Sh-h-h, mamma! Quiet, quiet! There isn't one of the boys wouldn't agree with me if they knew. We aren't big enough, I tell you, to sink a million in an out-of-town charity like that. In any charity, for that matter, no matter how big it shows up. You say yourself a million and a half will cripple you. Well, your first duty is to us living and not to him dead—To us living! It means my whole life, my whole life!" And she beat the pillow with hard fists.

"Ja, but—"

"With that money you can buy my happiness living, and he don't want it or need it dead."

Within the quick vise of her two hands Mrs. Meyerburg clasped her face, all quivering and racked with sobs. "I can't hear it. It's like she was sticking knifes into me."

"The marquis has the kind of blood we need to give this family a boost. We can be big, ma. Big, I tell you. I can have a crest embroidered in two colors in my linens. That inside clique that looks down on us now can do some looking up then. The boys don't need to know about that million, ma. Just let me have the marquis here to-morrow to meet his new brothers, ma, like there was nothing unusual. I'll pay it back to you in a million ways. The Memorial will come in time. Everything will come in time. Make me the happiest girl in the world, ma. He'll ask me to-night if I let him. Get the Memorial plans out of your head for a while, anyway! Just for a while!"

"Not so long as I got in me the strength to send down them plans to Goldfinger's office this afternoon with my message to go ahead. I don't invite no marquis here to-morrow for family dinner if I got to get him here with a million dollars' worth of bait. I—"

"Mamma!"

"Go and tell him your stingy old mamma would rather build a Home for the Old and Poor in memory of the grandest man what ever lived than give a snip like him, what never did a lick of work in his life, a fortune so he should have with it a good time at Monte Carlo. Just go tell him! Tell him!"

She was trembling now so that she could scarcely withdraw from the bedside, but her voice had lost none of its gale-like quality.

"Go tell him! Maybe it does him good he should hear." And in spite of her ague she crossed the vast room, slamming the door so that a great shudder ran over the room.

On the bed that had been lifted bodily from the Grand Trianon of Marie Antoinette, its laces upheaved about her like billows in anger, Rebecca Meyerburg lay with her face to the ceiling, raw sobs distorting it.

Steadying herself without that door, her hand laid between her breasts and slightly to the left, as if there a sharp pain had cut her, Mrs. Meyerburg leaned to the wall a moment, and, gaining quick composure, proceeded steadily enough across the wide aisle of hall, her hand following a balustrade.

A servant intercepted her half-way. "Madam—"

"Kemp, from here when I look down in the lower hall, all them ferns look yellow on top. I want you should please cut them!"

"Yes, madam. Mrs. Fischlowitz, madam, has been waiting down in the side hall for you."

"Mrs. Fischlowitz! For why you keep her waiting in the side hall?"

"Therese said madam was occupied."

"Bring her right up, Kemp, in the elevator. Her foot ain't so good. Right away, Kemp."

"Yes, madam."

Into Mrs. Meyerburg's room of many periods, its vastness so emphasized by the ceiling after Paolo Veronese, its fluted yellow-silk bed canopy reaching up to that ceiling stately and theatric enough to shade the sleep of a shah, limped Mrs. Fischlowitz timidly and with the uncertainty with which the callous feet of the unsocialistic poor tread velvet.

"How-do, Mrs. Fischlowitz?"

"Mrs. Meyerburg, I didn't want you to be disturbed except I want to explain to you why I'm late again this month."

"Sit down! I don't want you should even explain, Mrs. Fischlowitz—that's how little I thought about it."

Mrs. Meyerburg was full of small, pleased ways, drawing off her guest's decent black cape, pulling at her five-fingered mittens, lifting the nest-like bonnet.

"So! And how's the foot?"

"Not so good and not so bad. And how is the sciatica with you, Mrs. Meyerburg?"

"Like with you, Mrs. Fischlowitz. It could be better and it could be worse. Sometimes I got a little touch yet up between my ribs."

"If it ain't one thing, Mrs. Meyerburg, it's another. What you think why I'm late again with the rent, Mrs. Meyerburg? If last week my Sollie didn't fall off the delivery-wagon and sprain his back!"

"You don't say so!"

"That same job as you got him two years ago so good he's kept, and now such a thing has to happen. Gott sei dank, he's up and out again, but I tell you it was a scare!"

"I should say so. And how is Tillie?"

"Mrs. Meyerburg, you should just see for yourself how that girl has got new color since that certified milk you send her every day. Like a new girl so pretty all of a sudden she has grown. For to-morrow, Mrs. Meyerburg, a girl what never before had a beau in her life, if Morris Rinabauer, the young foreman where she works, 'ain't invited her out for New-Year's Day."

"You got great times down by Rivington Street this time of year. Not? I remember how my children used to like it with their horns oser like it was their own holiday."

"Ja, it's a great gedinks like always. Sometimes I say it gets so tough down there I hate my Tillie should come home from the factory after dark, but now with Morris Rinabauer—"

"Mrs. Fischlowitz, I guess you think it's a sin I should say so, but I tell you, when I think of that dirty little street down there and your flat what I lived in the seventeen happiest years of my life with my husband and babies—when I think back on my years in that little flat I—I can just feel myself tremble like all over. That's how happy we were down there, Mrs. Fischlowitz."

"I can tell you, Mrs. Meyerburg, when I got a place like this, at Rivington Street I wouldn't want I should ever have to look again."

"It's a feeling, Mrs. Fischlowitz, what you—you can't understand until—until you live through so much like me. I—I just want some day you should let me come down, Mrs. Fischlowitz, and visit by you in the old place, eh?"

"Ach, Mrs. Meyerburg, I can tell you the day what you visit on me down there I am a proud woman. How little we got to offer you know, but if I could fix for you Kaffeeklatsch some day and Kuchen and—"

"In the kitchen you still got the noodle-board yet, Mrs. Fischlowitz, where you can mix Kuchen too?"

"I should say so. Always on it I mix my doughs."

"He built it in for me himself, Mrs. Fischlowitz. On hinges so when I was done, up against the wall out of the way I could fold it."

"'Just think,' I say to my children, 'we eat noodles off a board what Simon Meyerburg built with his own hands.' On the whole East Side it's a curiosity."

"Sometimes when I come down by your flat, Mrs. Fischlowitz, I show you how I used to make them for him. Wide ones he liked."

"Ach, Mrs. Meyerburg, like you could put your hands in dough now!"

"'Mamma,' he used to say—standing in the kitchen door when he came home nights and looking at me maybe rocking Becky there by the stove and waiting supper for him—'Mamma,' he'd say, clapping his hands at me, 'open your eyes wide so I can see what's in 'em.'"

"That such a big man should play like that!"

"'Come in, darling,' I'd say; 'you can't guess from there what we got.'"

"Just think, like just married you were together."

"'Noodles!' he'd holler, and all the time right in back of me, spread out on the board, he could see 'em. I can see him yet, Mrs. Fischlowitz, standing there in the kitchen doorway, under the horseshoe what he found when we first landed."

"I can tell you, Mrs. Meyerburg, in that flat we 'ain't had nothing but luck, neither, with you so good to us."

"Ach, now, Mrs. Fischlowitz, for an old friend like you, what I lived next door to so many years and more as once gave my babies to keep for me when I must go out awhile, I shouldn't do a little yet."

"'Little,' she calls it. With such low rent you give us I'm ashamed to bring the money. Five weeks in the country and milk for my Tillie, until it's back from the grave you snatched her. Even on my back now every stitch what I got on I got to thank you for. Such comfort I got from that black cape!"

"I was just thinking, Mrs. Fischlowitz, with your rheumatism and on such a cold day a cape ain't so good for you, neither. Right up under it the wind can get."

"Warm like toast it is, Mrs. Meyerburg."

"I got a idea, Mrs. Fischlowitz! In that chest over there by the wall I got yet a jacket from Rivington Street. Right away it got too tight for me. Like new it is, with a warm beaver collar. At auction one day he got it for me. Like a top it will fit you, Mrs. Fischlowitz."

"No, no, please, Mrs. Meyerburg. It just looks like every time what I come you got to give me something. Ashamed it makes me. Please you shouldn't."

But in the pleasant frenzy of sudden decision Mrs. Meyerburg was on her knees beside a carved chest, burrowing her arm beneath folded garments, the high smell of camphor exuding.

"Only yesterday in my hand I had it. There! See! Just your size!" She held the creased garment out from her by each shoulder, blowing the nap of the beaver collar.

"Please, no, Mrs. Meyerburg. Such a fine coat maybe you can wear it yourself. No, I don't mean that, when you got such grander ones; but for me, Mrs. Meyerburg, it's too fine to take. Please!"

Standing there holding it thrust enthusiastically forward, a glaze suddenly formed over Mrs. Meyerburg's eyes and she laid her cheek to the brown fur collar, a tear dropping to it.

"You'm right, Mrs. Fischlowitz, I—I can't give this up. I—he—a coat he bought once for me at auction when—he oser could afford it. I—you must excuse me, Mrs. Fischlowitz."

"That's right, Mrs. Meyerburg, for a remembrance you should keep it."

Then brightening: "But I got in the next room, Mrs. Fischlowitz, a coat better as this for you. Lined all in squirrel-skin they call it. One day by myself I bought it, and how my Becky laughs and won't even let me wear it in automobile. I ain't stylish enough, she says."

With an inarticulate medley of sounds Mrs. Fischlowitz held up a hand of remonstrance. "But—"

"Na, na, just a minute." And on the very wings of her words Mrs. Meyerburg was across the room, through the ornate door of an ornate boudoir, and out presently with the garment flung across her arm. "Na, here put it on."

"Ach, such a beau-tiful coat!"

"So! Let me help!"

They leaned together, their faces, which the years had passed over none too lightly, close and eager. Against the beaver collar Mrs. Fischlowitz's hand lay fluttering.

"Put your hands in the pockets, Mrs. Fischlowitz. Deep, eh?"

"Finer you can believe me as I ever had in my life before. I can tell you, Mrs. Meyerburg, a woman like you should get first place in heaven and you should know how many on the East Side there is says the same. I—I brought you your rent, Mrs. Meyerburg. You must excuse how late, but my Sollie—"

"Ja, ja."

Eleven! Twelve! Twelve-fifty! Mrs. Fischlowitz counted it out carefully from a small purse tucked in her palm, snapping it carefully shut over the remaining coins.

"Thank you, Mrs. Fischlowitz. You should never feel hurried. Mr. Oppenheimer will mail you a receipt."

"I guess now I must be going, Mrs. Meyerburg—to-night I promised my Sollie we have cheese-Kuchen for supper."

"Always I used to make it with a short crust for my Isadore. How he loved it!"

"Just again, Mrs. Meyerburg, I want you should let me say how—how this is the finest present what I ever had in my life. I can tell you from just how soft it is on me, I can tell how it must feel to ride in automobile."

A light flashed in brilliance up into Mrs. Meyerburg's face. "Mrs. Fischlowitz!"

"Ja, Mrs. Meyerburg?"

"I tell you what! I—this afternoon my Becky, Mrs. Fischlowitz, she—she ain't so well and like always can't take with me a ride in the Park. Such—such a cold that girl has got. How I should like it, Mrs. Fischlowitz, if you would be so kind to—to take with me my drive in—in your new coat."

"I—"

"Ja, ja, I know, Mrs. Fischlowitz, cheese Kuchen should first get cold before supper, but if you could just an hour ride by me a little? If you would be so kind, Mrs. Fischlowitz!"

Diffidence ran trembling along Mrs. Meyerburg's voice, as if she dared not venture too far upon a day blessed with tasks. "I got always so—so much time to myself now'days, Mrs. Fischlowitz, sometimes I—I get maybe a—a little lonesome."

"Ach, Mrs. Meyerburg, you don't want to be bothered with such—such a person like me when you ride so grand through the Park."

"Fit like a fiddle it will make you feel, Mrs. Fischlowitz. Button up tight that collar and right away we start. Please, right next to you, will you press that third button? That means we go right down and find outside the car waiting for us."

"But, Mrs. Meyerburg—"

"See, just like you, I put on a coat on the inside fur. This way, Mrs. Fischlowitz. Careful, your foot!"

In the great lower hall full of Tudor gloom the carved stone arches dropping in rococo stalactites from the ceiling, and a marble staircase blue-veined as a delicate woman's hand winding up to an oriole window, a man-servant swung back two sets of trellised doors; bowed them noiselessly shut again.

The quick cold of December bit them at the threshold. Opposite lay the Park, its trees, in their smooth bark whipped bare, and gray as nuns, the sunlight hard against their boles. More sunlight lay cold and glittering down the length of the most facaded avenue in the world and on the great up-and-down stream of motor-cars and their nickel-plated snouts and plate-glass sides.

Women, with heads too haughty to turn them right or left, moved past in closed cars that were perfumed and upholstered like jewel-boxes; the joggly smartness of hansom cabs, their fair fares seeing and being seen behind the wooden aprons and their frozen laughter coming from their lips in vapor! On the broad sidewalks women in low shoes that defied the wind, and men in high hats that the wind defied; nursemaids trim as deaconesses, and their charges the beautiful exotic children of pure milk and pure sunshine!

One of these deaconess-like nursemaids, walking out with a child whose black curls lay in wide sprays on each shoulder, detached herself from the up-town flow and crossed to the trellised threshold.

"Good afternoon, Madam Meyerburg. Mademoiselle, dites bonjour a madame votre grand'maman."

"Bonjour, grand'maman."

In the act of descending her steps, Mrs. Meyerburg's hands flew outward. "Ach, du little Aileen. Come, Aileen, to grandma. Mrs. Fischlowitz, this is Felix's little girl. You remember Felix—such a beautiful bad little boy he was what always used to fight your Sollie underneath the sink."

"Gott in Himmel, so this is Felix's little girl!"

"Ja, this is already his second. Come, Aileen, to grandma and say good afternoon to the lady."

The maid guided the small figure forward by one shoulder. "Dites bonjour a madame, Mademoiselle Aileen."

"Bonjour, madame."

"Not a word of English she can speak yet, Mrs. Fischlowitz. I tell you already my grandchildren are so smart not even their language I can understand. Aber for why such a child should only talk so in her own country she can't be understood, I don't know."

"I guess, Mrs. Meyerburg, it's style now'days that you shouldn't know your own language."

"Come by grandma to-morrow, Aileen, and upstairs I got in the little box sweet cakes like grandma always keeps for you. Eh, baby?"

"Say thank you, grandmother."

"Merci bien, grand'maman."

And they were off into the stream again, the small white leggings at a smart trot.

At the curb a low-bodied, high-power car, with the top flung back and the wind-shield up, lay sidled against the coping.

"Get right in, Mrs. Fischlowitz. Burk, put under Mrs. Fischlowitz's both feet a heater."

A second man, in too-accentuated livery of mauve and astrakhan, flung open the wide door. A glassed-in chauffeur, in more mauve and astrakhan, threw in his clutch. The door slammed. Mrs. Fischlowitz breathed deep and grasped the nickel-plated door handle. Mrs. Meyerburg leaned out, her small plumes wagging.

"Burk, since Miss Becky ain't along to-day, I don't want in front no second man."

"Yes, madam."

"I want instead you should take the roadster and call after Mrs. Weinstein. You know, down by Twenty-third Street, the fourth floor back."

"Yes, madam."

"I want you should say, Burk, that Mrs. Meyerburg says her and her daughter should take off from their work an hour for a drive wherever they say you should take them. And tell her, Burk, she should make for me five dozens more them paper carnations. Right away I want you should go."

"Yes, madam."

They nosed slowly into the stream of the Avenue.

"Always Becky likes there should be two men stuck up in front there. I always say to look only at the backs of my servants I don't go out riding for."

Erect and as if to the fantastic requirements of the situation sat Mrs. Fischlowitz, her face of a thousand lines screwed to maintain the transiency of a great moment.

"That I should live, Mrs. Meyerburg, to see such a sight like this! In the thirty years I been in this country not but once have I walked up Fifth Avenue—that time when my Tillie paraded in the shirtwaist strike. I—I can tell you I'm proud to live to see it this way from automobile."

"Lean back, Mrs. Fischlowitz, so you be more comfortable. That's all right; you can't hurt them bottles. My Becky likes to have fancy touches all over everything. Gold-tops bottles she has to have yet by her. I can tell you, though, Mrs. Fischlowitz, if I do say it myself, when that girl sits up in here like a picture she looks. How they stare you should see."

"Such a beau-ti-ful girl! I can tell you for her a prince ain't good enough. Ach, what a pleasure it must be, Mrs. Meyerburg, for a mother to know if her child wants heaven she can nearly get it for her. I can tell you that must be the greatest pleasure of all for you, Mrs. Meyerburg, to give to your daughter everything just like she wants it."

"Ja, ja," said with little to indicate mental ferment.

They were in the Park, with the wind scampering through the skeins of bare tree branches. The lake lay locked in ice, skaters in the ecstasy of motion lunging across it. Beneath the mink lap-robe Mrs. Fischlowitz snuggled deeper and more lax.

"Gott in Himmel, I tell you this is better as standing over my cheese Kuchen."

"Always I used to let my cheese drip first the night before. Right through a cheese-cloth sack hung from a nail what my husband drove in for me under the window-sill."

"Right that same nail is there yet, Mrs. Meyerburg. Oser we should touch one thing!"

"I can tell you it's a great comfort, Mrs. Fischlowitz, I got such a tenant as you in there."

"When you come to visit me, Mrs. Meyerburg, right to the last nail like you left it you find it. Not even from the kitchen would I let my Sollie take down the old clothes-line what you had stretched across one end."

"Ach, how many times in rainy days I used that line. It's a good little line I bet yet. Not?"

"Ja." But with no corresponding kit of emotions in Mrs. Fischlowitz's voice. She was still breathing deep the buoyant ether of the moment, and beneath the ingratiating warmth of fur utterly soothed. "Gott," she said, "I wish my sister-in-law, Hanna, with all her fine airs up where she lives on One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Street, could see me now. Oser she could stare and stare, and bow and bow, and past her I would roll like—like a rolling-pin."

From the gold-topped bottle nearest her came a long insidious whiff of frangipani. She dared to lean toward it, sniffing.

"Such a beautiful smell." And let her eyes half close.

"You market your meat yet on Fridays down by old Lavinsky's, Mrs. Fischlowitz?"

"Ja, just like always, only his liver ain't so good like it used to be. I can tell you that's a beau-ti-ful smell."

An hour they rode purringly over smooth highways and for a moment alongside the river, but there the wind was edged with ice and they were very presently back into the leisurely flow of the Avenue. From her curves Mrs. Fischlowitz unbent herself slowly.

"No, no, Mrs. Fischlowitz—you stay in."

"Ach, I get out here at your house, too, and take the street-cars. I—"

"No, no. James takes you all the way home, Mrs. Fischlowitz. I get out because my Becky likes I should get home early and get dressed up for dinner."

"But Mrs. Meyerburg—"

"No, no. Right in you stay. 'Sh-h-h, just don't mention it. Enough pleasure you give me to ride by me. Take good care your foot. Good-by, Mrs. Fischlowitz. All the way home you should take her, James."

Once more within the gloom of her Tudor hall, Mrs. Meyerburg hurried rearward and toward the elevator. But down the curving stairway the small maid on stilts came, intercepting her.

"Madame!"

"Ja."

"Madame will please come. Mademoiselle Betty this afternoon ees not so well. Three spells of fainting, madame."

"Therese!"

"Oui, not serious, madame, but what I would call hysteeria and mademoiselle will not have doctor. Eef madame will come—"

With a great mustering of her strength Mrs. Meyerburg ran up the first three of the marble steps, then quite as suddenly stopped, reaching out for the balustrade. The seconds stalked past as she stood there, a fine frown sketched on her brow, and the small maid anxious and attendant.

"Madame?"

When Mrs. Meyerburg spoke finally it was as if those seconds had been years, sapping more than their share of life from her. "I—now I don't go up, Therese. After a while I come, but—but not now. I want, though, you should go right away up to Miss Becky with a message."

"Oui, madame."

"I want you should tell her for me, Therese, that—that to-morrow New-Year's dinner with the family all here, I—I want she should invite the Marquis Rosencrantz. That everything is all right. Right away I want you should go and tell her, Therese!"

"Oui, madame."

Up in her bedroom and without pause Mrs. Meyerburg walked directly to the small deal table there beside her bed and still littered with half-curled blue-prints. These she gathered into a tight roll, snapping a rubber band about it. She rang incisively the fourth of the row of bells. A man-servant responded almost immediately with a light rap-a-tap at the door. She was there and waiting.

"Kemp, I want you should away take down this roll to Goldfinger's office in the Syndicate Building. Just say Mrs. Meyerburg says everything is all right—to go ahead."

"Yes, madam." And he closed the door after him, holding the knob a moment to save the click.

* * * * *

In a Tudor dining-hall, long as the banquet-room of a thane, faced in thrice-weathered oak and designed by an architect too eminent to endure interference—except when Miss Meyerburg had later and at her own stealthy volition installed a Pompeian colored window above the high Victorian fireplace—the wide light of a brilliant New-Year's day lay against leaded window-panes, but shut out by thick hangings.

Instead, the yellow light from a ceiling sown with starlike bulbs lay over that room. At each end of the table, so that the gracious glow fell full upon the small figure of Mrs. Meyerburg at one end and upon the grizzled head of Mr. Ben Meyerburg at the other, two braces of candles burned softly, crocheting a flickering design upon the damask.

From the foot of that great table, his place by precedence of years, Mr. Ben Meyerburg rose from his Voltairian chair, holding aloft a wineglass like a torch.

"Masseltov, ma," he said, "and just like we drank to the happy couple who have told us the good news to-day, so now I drink to the grandest little mother in the world. Masseltov, ma." And he drained his glass, holding it with fine disregard back over one shoulder for refilling.

Round that table Mrs. Meyerburg's four remaining sons, towering almost twice her height, rose in a solemn chorus that was heavier than their libations of wine.

"Masseltov, ma."

"Ach, boys, my sons, ich—ich—danke." She was quivering now in the edge of tears and grasped tightly at the arms of her chair.

"Masseltov, ma," said Rebecca Meyerburg, raising her glass and her moist eyes shining above it. The five daughters-in-law followed immediate suit. At Miss Meyerburg's left the Marquis Rosencrantz, with pointed features and a silhouette sharp as a knife edge, raised his glass and his waxed mustache and drank, but silently and over a deep bow.

"Mamma—mother dear, the marquis drinks to you."

Mrs. Meyerburg turned upon him with a great mustering of amiability and safely withdrawn now from her brink of tears. "I got now six sons what can drink to my health—not, Marquis?"

"She says, Marquis," translated Miss Meyerburg, ardently, to the sharp profile, "that now she has six sons to drink to her health."

"Madame me fait trop d'honneur."

"He says, mamma, that it is too great an honor to be your son."

From her yesterday's couch of mental travail Miss Meyerburg had risen with a great radiance turping out its ravages. She was Sheban in elegance, the velvet of her gown taken from the color of the ruby on her brow, and the deep-white flesh of her the quality of that same velvet with the nap raised.

"He wants to kiss your hand, ma. Give it to him. No, the right one, dearie."

"I—I'm much obliged, Marquis. I—well, for one little old woman like me, I got now six sons and six daughters, each one big enough to carry me off under his arm. Not?"

She was met with immediate acclaim from a large blond daughter-in-law, her soft, expansive bosom swathed in old lace caught up with a great jeweled lizard.

"Little old nothing, ma. I always say to Isadore you've got more energy yet than the rest of the family put together."

"Ach, Dora, always you children like to make me think I been young yet."

But she was smilingly tremulous and pushed herself backward in her heavy throne-like chair. A butler sprang, lifting it gently from her.

Immediately the great, disheveled table, brilliantly littered with crystal, frumpled napkins, and a great centerpiece of fruits and flowers, was in the confusion of disorganization.

Daughters-in-law and husbands moved up toward a pair of doors swung heavily backward by two servants.

Mrs. Isadore Meyerburg pushed her real-lace bodice into place and adjusted the glittering lizard. "Believe me," she said, exuding a sigh and patting her bosom on the swell of that deep breath, "I ate too much, but if I can't break my diet for the last engagement in the family, and to nobility at that, when will I do it?"

"I should say so," replied Mrs. Rudolph Meyerburg, herself squirming to rights in an elaborate bodice and wielding an unostentatious toothpick behind the cup of her hand; "like I told Roody just now, if I take on a pound to-day he can blame his sister."

"Say, I wish you'd look at the marquis kissing ma's hand again, will you?"

"Look at ma get away with it too. You've got to hand it to them French, they've got the manners all right. No wonder our swell Trixie tags after them."

"Say, Becky shouldn't get manners yet with her looks and five hundred thousand thrown in. I bet, if the truth is known, and since ma is going to live over there with them, that there's a few extra thousand tacked on too."

"Not if the court knows it! Like I told Roody this morning, she's bringing a title into the family, but she's taking a big wad of the Meyerburg money out of the country too."

"It is so, ain't it?"

Around her crowded Mrs. Meyerburg's five sons.

"Come with us, ma. We got a children's party up in the ballroom for Aileen this afternoon, and then Trixie and I are going to motor down to Sheepshead for the indoor polo-match. Come, ma."

"No, no, Felix. I want for myself rest this afternoon. All you children go and have your good times. I got home more as I can do, and maybe company, too."

"Tell you what, ma, come with Dora and me and the kids. She wants to go out to Hastings this afternoon to see her mother. Come with us, ma. The drive will do you good."

"No, no, Izzy. When I ride too much in the cold right away up in my ribs comes the sciatica again."

Miss Meyerburg bent radiant over her parent. "Mother," she whispered, her throat lined with the fur of tenderness, "it's reception-day out at that club, and all the cliques will be there, and I want—"

"Sure, Becky, you and the marquis should drive out. Take the big car, but tell James he shouldn't be so careless driving by them curves out there by the golf-links."

"But, ma dear, you come, too, and—"

"No, no, Becky; to-day I got not time."

"But, ma—ma, you ain't mad at me, dear? You can see now for yourself, can't you, dear, what a big thing it is for the family and how you—"

"Yes, yes, Becky. Look, go over by your young man. See how he stands there and not one word what Ben is hollering so at him can he understand."

Across the room, alongside a buffet wrought out of the powerful Jacobean period, Mr. Ben Meyerburg threw a violent contortion.

"Want to go up in the Turkish room and smoke?" he shouted, the apoplectic purple of exertion rushing into his face and round to the roll of flesh overhanging the rear of his collar.

"Pardon?"

"Smoke? Do you smoke? Smokez-vous? Cigarez-vous? See, like this. Fume. Blow. Do you smoke? Smokez-vous?"

"Pardon?" said the marquis, bowing low.

* * * * *

In the heavy solitude of Mrs. Meyerburg's bedchamber, the buzz of departures over, silence lay resumed, but with a singing quality to it as if an echo or so still lingered.

Before the plain deal table, and at her side two files bulging their contents, Mrs. Meyerburg sat with her spatulate finger conning in among a page of figures. After a while the finger ceased to move across the page, but lay passive midway down a column. After another while she slapped shut the book and took to roaming up and down the large room as if she there found respite from the spirit of her which nagged and carped. Peering out between the heavy curtains, she could see the tide of the Avenue mincing, prancing, chugging past. Resuming her beat up and down the vistas of the room, she could still hear its voice muffled and not unlike the tune of quinine singing in the head.

The ormolu clock struck, and from various parts of the house musical repetitions. A French tinkle from her daughter's suite across the hall; from somewhere more remote the deep, leisurely tones of a Nuremberg floor clock. Finally Mrs. Meyerburg dropped into the overstuffed chair beside her window, relaxing into the attitude her late years had brought her, head back, hands stretched out along the chair sides, and full of rest. An hour she sat half dozing, and half emerging every so often with a start, then lay quietly looking into space, her eyes quiet and the erstwhile brilliancy in them gone out like a light.

Presently she sat forward suddenly, and with the quick light of perception flooding up into her face; slid from her chair and padded across the carpet. From the carved chest alongside the wall she withdrew the short jacket with the beaver collar, worked her shoulders into it. From the adjoining boudoir she emerged after a time in a small bonnet grayish with age and the bow not perky. Her movements were brief and full of decision. When she opened her door it was slyly and with a quick, vulpine glance up and down the grave quiet of the halls. After a cocked attitude of listening and with an incredible springiness almost of youth, Mrs. Meyerburg was down a rear staircase, through a rear hallway, and, unseen and unheard, out into the sudden splendor of a winter's day, the side street quiet before her.

"Gott!" said Mrs. Meyerburg, audibly, breathing deep and swinging into a smart lope eastward. Two blocks along, with her head lifted and no effort at concealment, she passed her pantry-boy walking out with a Swedish girl whose cheeks were bursting with red. He eyed his mistress casually and without recognition.

At Third Avenue she boarded a down-town street-car, a bit winded from the dive across cobbles, but smiling. Within, and after a preliminary method of paying fare new and confusing to her, she sat back against the rattly sides, her feet just lifted off the floor. She could hardly keep back the ejaculations as old streets and old memories swam into view.

"Look at the old lay-dee talking to her-sel-uph," sang an urchin across the aisle.

"Shut up," said the mother, slapping him sidewise.

At one of the most terrific of these down-town streets Mrs. Meyerburg descended. Beneath the clang and bang of the Elevated she stood confused for the moment and then, with her sure stride regained, swung farther eastward.

Slitlike streets flowed with holiday copiousness, whole families abroad on foot—mothers swayback with babies, and older children who ran ahead shouting and jostling. Houses lean and evil-looking marched shoulder to shoulder for blocks, no gaps except intersecting streets. Fire-escapes ran zigzag down the meanest of them. Women shouted their neighborhood jargon from windows flung momentarily open. Poverty scuttled along close to the scant shelter of these houses. An old man, with a beard to his chest, paused in a doorway to cough, and it was like the gripe-gripe of a saw with its teeth in hard wood. A woman sold apples from a stoop, the form of a child showing through her shawl. Yet Mrs. Meyerburg smiled as she hurried.

Midway in one of these blocks and without a pretense of hesitancy she turned into a black mouth of an entrance and up two flights. On each landing she paused more for tears than for breath. At a rear door leading off the second landing she knocked softly, but with insistence. It opened to a slight crack, then immediately swung back full span.

"Gott in Himmel, Mrs. Meyerburg! Mrs. Meyerburg! Kommen Sie herein. Mrs. Meyerburg, for why you didn't let me know? To think not one of my children home and to-day a holiday, my place not in order—"

"Now, now, Mrs. Fischlowitz, just so soon you go to one little bit of trouble, right away I got no more pleasure. Please, Mrs. Fischlowitz. Ach, if you 'ain't got on your pantry shelfs just the same paper edge like my Roody used to cut out for me."

"Come, come, Mrs. Meyerburg, in parlor where—"

"Go way mit you. Ain't the kitchen where I spent seventeen years, the best years in my life, good enough yet? Parlor yet she wants to take me."

An immediate negligee of manner enveloped her like an old wrapper. A certain tulle of bewilderment had fallen. She was bold, even dictatorial.

"Don't fuss round me so much, Mrs. Fischlowitz. Just like old times I want it should seem. Like maybe I just dropped in on you a lump of butter to borrow. No, no, don't I know where to hang mine own bonnet in mine own house? Ach, the same coat nails what he drove in himself!"

"To think, Mrs. Meyerburg, all my children gone out for a good time this afternoon, my Tillie with Morris Rinabauer, who can't keep his eyes off her—"

"How polished she keeps her stove, just like I used to."

"Right when you knocked I was thinking, well, I clean up a bit. Please, Mrs. Meyerburg, let me fix you right away a cup coffee—"

"Right away, Mrs. Fischlowitz, just so soon you begin to make fuss over me, I don't enjoy it no more. Please, Mrs. Fischlowitz, right here in this old rocker-chair by the range let me, please, sit quiet a minute."

In the wooden rocker beside the warm stove she sat down quietly, lapping her hands over her waist-line.

"Gott in Himmel," sitting well away from the chair-back and letting her eyes travel slowly about the room, "just like it was yesterday; just like yesterday." And fell to reciting the phrase softly.

"Ja, ja," said Mrs. Fischlowitz, concealing an unwashed litter of dishes beneath a hastily flung cloth. "I can tell you, Mrs. Meyerburg, my house ain't always this dirty; only to-day not—"

"Just like it was yesterday," said Mrs. Meyerburg, musing through a tangle of memories. She fell to rocking. A narrow band of sunshine lay across the bare floor, even glinted off a pan or two hung along the wall over the sink. Along that same wall hung a festoon of red and green peppers and a necklace of garlic. Toward the back of the range a pan of hot water let off a lazy vapor. Beside the scuttle a cat purred and fought off sleep.

"Already I got the hot water, Mrs. Meyerburg, to make you a cup coffee if—"

"Please, Mrs. Fischlowitz, let me rest like this. In a minute I want you should take me all through in the children's room and—"

"If I had only known it how I could have cleaned for you."

"Ach, my noodle-board over there! How grand and white you keep it."

"Ja, I—"

"Mrs. Fischlowitz!"

"Yes, Mrs. Meyerburg?"

"Mrs. Fischlowitz, if you want to—to give me a real treat I tell you what. I tell you what!"

"Ja, ja, Mrs. Meyerburg; anything what I can do I—"

"I want you should let me mix you on that old board a mess noodles!"

"Ach, Mrs. Meyerburg, your hands and that grand black-silk dress!"

"For why not, Mrs. Fischlowitz? Wide ones, like he used to like. Just for fun, please, Mrs. Fischlowitz. To-morrow I send you two barrels flour for what I use up."

"But, Mrs. Meyerburg, I should make for you noodles, not you for me—"

"It's good I should learn, Mrs. Fischlowitz, to get back my hand in such things. Maybe you don't believe me, but I ain't so rich like I was yesterday when you seen me, Mrs. Fischlowitz. To-day I'm a poor woman, Mrs. Fischlowitz, with—"

Mrs. Fischlowitz threw out two hands in a liberal gesture. "Such a good woman she is! In my house where I'm poor she wants, too, to play like she's a poor woman. That any one should want to play such a game with themselves! Noodles she wants to make for me, instead I should wait on her like she was a queen."

"It takes me back, Mrs. Fischlowitz, to old times. Please, Mrs. Fischlowitz, to-morrow I send you two barrels."

"Like you ain't welcome to everything what I got in the house. All right, noodles you should make and always I keep 'em for remembrance. Just let me run down to cellar and bring you up flour. No, no, you set there and let me fold down the board for you. Rock there, Mrs. Meyerburg, till I come up with the flour. Eggs plenty I got."

"And a little butter, Mrs. Fischlowitz, the size of an egg, and always a pinch of salt."

"The neighbors should see this! Mrs. Simon Meyerburg making for me noodles in my kitchen!" She was off and down a small rear stairway, a ribbon of ejaculations trailing back over one shoulder.

In her chair beside the warm range Mrs. Meyerburg sat quiescent, her head back against the rest, eyes half closed, and slanting toward the kitchen door. Against the creaking floor her chair swayed rhythmically. Tears ran down to meet the corners of her mouth, but her lips were looped up in a smile.

The cat regarded her through green eyes slit down their middle. Toward the rear of the stove the pan of water seethed.

Suddenly Mrs. Meyerburg leaned forward with a great flash across her face. "Simon," she cried, leaning to the door and stretching forward quavering arms. "Simon, my darling!" She leaned further, the rims of her eyes stretched wide. "Simon—come, my darling. Simon!"

Into the opposite doorway, smirched with flour and a white pail of it dangling, flashed Mrs. Fischlowitz, breathing hard from her climb.

"What, Mrs. Meyerburg, you want something?"

"Simon," cried Mrs. Meyerburg, her voice lifted in a paean of welcome; "come, my darling, come in. Come!" And she tried to rise, but sat back, quivering, her brow drenched in sudden sweat.

Raucous terror tore through Mrs. Fischlowitz's voice, and she let fall her pail, a white cloud rising from off the spill. "Mrs. Meyerburg, there ain't nobody there. Mrs. Meyerburg, he ain't there. Mrs. Meyerburg!"

"Simon!"

"Mrs. Meyerburg, he ain't there. Nobody's there! Ach—help—doctor—Tillie!"

Back against Mrs. Fischlowitz's frenzied arms lay Mrs. Meyerburg, very gray, her hand against her left breast and down toward the ribs.

"Gott! Gott! Please, Mrs. Meyerburg—Mrs. Meyerburg!" dragging back one of the weary eyelids and crying out at what she saw there. "Help doctor—Tillie—quick—quick—"

She could not see, poor dear, that into those locked features was crystallized the great ecstasy of reunion.



THE NTH COMMANDMENT

The Christmas ballad of the stoker, even though writ from the fiery bowels of amidships and with a pen reeking with his own sweat, could find no holiday sale; nor the story of the waiter who serves the wine he dares only smell, and weary stands attendant into the joyous dawn. Such social sores—the drayman, back bent to the Christmas box whose mysteries he must never know; the salesgirl standing on her swollen feet on into the midnight hour—such sores may run and fester, but not to sicken public eyes.

For the Christmas spirit is the white flame of love burning in men's hearts and may not be defiled. Shop-windows, magazine covers, and post-cards proclaim good-will to all men; bedtime stories crooned when little heads are drowsy are of Peace on Earth; corporations whose draymen's backs are bent and whose salesgirls' feet are swollen plaster each outgoing parcel with a Good-Will-Toward-Men stamp, and remove the stools from behind the counters to give space to more of the glittering merchandise.

In the Mammoth Store the stools have long since been removed and the holiday hysteria of Peace on Earth rose to its Christmas Eve climax, as a frenzied gale drives upward the sea into mountains of water, or scuds through black-hearted forests, bending them double in wild salaam.

Shoppers pushed through aisles so packed that the tide flowed back upon itself. A narrow-chested woman, caught in the whorl of one such vortex, fainted back against the bundle-laden arms that pressed her on. Above the thin orchestra of musical toys, the tramp of feet like an army marching, voices raucous from straining to be heard, a clock over the grand central stairway boomed nine, and the crowd pulled at its strength for a last hour of bartering, tearing, pushing, haggling, sweating.

Behind the counters workers sobbed in their throats and shifted from one swollen foot to the other. A cash-girl, her eyeballs glazed like those of a wounded hare in the torture of the chase, found a pile of pasteboard boxes behind a door, and with the indifference of exhaustion dropped on to it asleep. The tide flowed on, and ever and again back upon itself. A Santa Claus in a red canton-flannel coat lost his white canton-flannel beard, nor troubled to recover it. A woman trembling with the ague of terror drew an imitation bisque doll off a counter and into the shallow recesses of her cape, and the cool hand of the law darted after her and closed over her wrist and imitation bisque evidence. A prayer, a moan, the crowd parting and closing again.

The mammoth Christmas tree beneath the grand central stairway loped ever so slightly of its own gorgeousness, and the gold star at its apex titillated to the tramp-tramp of the army. Across the novelty leather-goods counter Mr. Jimmie Fitzgibbons leaned the blue-shaven, predacious face that head waiters and underfed salesgirls know best over a hot bird and a cold bottle. Men's hands involuntarily close into tight fists when his well-pressed sleeve accidentally brushes their wives or sisters. Six-dollar-a-week salesgirls scrape their luscious rare birds to the bone, drink thin gold wine from thin, gold-edged glasses, and curse their God when the reckoning comes.

Behind the novelty leather-goods counter Mrs. Violet Smith, whose eyes were the woodland blue her name boasted, smiled back and leaned against the stock-shelves, her face upturned and like a tired flower.

"If the rush hadn't quit right this minute I—I couldn't have lasted it out till closing, honest I couldn't."

"Poor tired little filly!"

"Even them ten minutes I got leave to go up to old Ingram's office they made up for when I came back, and put another batch of them fifty-nine-cent leatherette purses out in the bin."

"Poor little filly! What you need is a little speed. I wanna blow you to-night, Doll. You went once and you can make it twice. Come on, Doll, it ain't every little girl I'd coax like this."

"I—Jimmie—I—"

"I wanna blow you to-night, Doll. A poor little blue-eyed queenie like you, all froze up with nothing but a sick husband for a Christmas tree—a poor little baby doll like you!"

"The kid, too, Jimmie, I—oughtn't!"

"Didn't you tell me yourself it sleeps through the night like a whippersnapper? Don't be a quitter Doll, didn't you?"

"Yes, but—"

"A poor little baby doll like you! Why, there just ain't nothing too good for you. Some little time I showed you last Tuesday night—eh, Doll?"

"Yes—Jimmie!"

"Well, if you think that was some evening, you watch me to-night!"

"I—can't—go, Jimmie, him layin' there, and the kid and all!"

"Didn't I have to coax you last time just like to-night? And wasn't you glad when you looked out and seen how blasted cold and icy it was that you lemme blow you—wasn't you?"

"Yes, Jimmie, but—"

"Didn't I blow you to a bottle of bubble water to take home with you even after the big show was over, and wouldn't I have blown you to yellow instead of the red if you hadn't been a little cheap skate and wanted the red? Didn't I pin a two-dollar bunch of hothouse grapes on your hat right out of the fruit-bowl? Didn't I blow you for proper?"

"It was swell, Jimmie!"

"Well, I'm going to blow in my winnings on you to-night, Doll. It's Christmas Eve and—"

"Yes, it's Christmas Eve, Jimmie, and he—he had one of his bad hemorrhages last night, and the kid, she—she's too little to know she's getting cheated out of her Christmas, but, gee—a—a kid oughtta have something—a tree or something."

He leaned closer, hemmed in by the crowd. "It's you oughtta have something, Doll."

"I—I never oughtta gone with you last Tuesday night, Jimmie. When I got home, he—he was laying there like a rag."

"I like you, Doll. I'm going to blow in the stack of my winnings on you—that's how much I like you. There ain't nothing I wouldn't do for a little filly like you."

"Jimmie!"

"There ain't!"

"Aw!"

"You wouldn't be in the hole you are now, Doll, if you hadn't sneaked off two years ago and done it while I wasn't looking. Nearly two whole years you lemme lose track of you! That ain't a nice way to treat a fellow that likes you."

"We went boarding right away, Jimmie, and I only came back to the department two months ago, after he got so bad. 'Ain't I told you how things just kinda happened?"

"I liked you myself, Doll, but you fell for a pair of shoulders over in the gents' furnishing that wasn't wide from nothing but padding. I could have told you there was all cotton batting and no lungs there. I could have told you."

"Jimmie, ain't you ashamed! Jimmie!"

"Aw, I was just kidding. But you ain't real on that true-blue stuff, Doll. I can look into your eyes and see you're bustin' to lemme blow you. That's what you get, sweetness, when you don't ask your Uncle Fuller first. If you'd have asked me I could have told you he was weak in the chest when you married him. I could have told you that you'd be back here two years later selling leatherette vanity-cases and supportin' a—"

"You! Jimmie Fitzgibbons, you—"

"Gad, Doll, go to it! When you color up like that you look like a rose—a whole bouquet of them."

"You—you don't know nothing about him. He—he never knew he had a lung till a month after the kid came, and they moved the gents' furnishing over by the Broadway door where the draught caught him."

"Sure, he didn't, Doll; no harm meant. That's right, stand by him. I like to see it. Why, a little queen across the counter from you tole me you'd have married him if he'd had three bum lungs, that crazy you was!"

"Like fun! If me or him had dreamt he wasn't sound we—I wouldn't be in this mess, I—we—I wouldn't!"

Her little face was pale as a spray of jessamine against a dark background, and, try as she would to check them, tears sprang hot to her eyes, dew trembled on her lashes.

"Poor little filly!"

More tears rushed to her eyes, as if he had touched the wellsprings of her self-compassion. "You gotta excuse me, Jimmie. I ain't cryin', only I'm dog tired from nursin' and drudgin', drudgin' and nursin'."

"Hard luck, little un!"

"Him layin' there and me tryin' to—to make things meet. You gotta excuse me, Jimmie, I'm done up."

"That's why I wanna blow you, sweetness. I can't bear to see a little filly like you runnin' with the odds dead agin her."

"You been swell to me, Jimmie."

"The sky's my limit, Doll."

"Maybe it wasn't right for me to go with you last Tuesday night, him layin' there, and the kid and all, but a girl's gotta have something, don't she, Jimmie? A girl that's got on her shoulders what I got has gotta have something—a laugh now and then!"

"That's the goods, Doll. A little filly like you has got to."

"Honest, the way I laughed when you stuck them hothouse grapes on my hat for trimming the other night, just like they didn't cost nothing—honest, the way I laughed gimme enough strength for a whole night's nursin'. Honest, I felt like in the old days before—before I was married."

"Gad! if you had treated me white in them days, Doll—if you hadn't pulled that saint stuff on me and treated me cold storage—there ain't nothing I wouldn't have done for you."

"I—I didn't mean nothing, Jimmie."

"I ain't sore, Doll. I like you and I like your style. I always did, even in the days when you turned me down, you great big beautiful doll, you!"

"Aw—you!"

"If you're the real little sport I think you are, you're going to lemme blow you to the liveliest Christmas a little queen like you ever seen. I didn't make that winnin' down in Atlanta for nothing. When I got the telegram I says to myself: 'Here goes! I'm goin' to make last Tuesday night look like a prayer-meeting, I am.' Eh, Doll?"

"I—I can't, Jimmie. I—'S-s-s-s-h!"

A tide flowed in about the counter, separating them, and she was suddenly the center of a human whorl, a battle of shoulders and elbows and voices pitched high with gluttony. Mr. Fitzgibbons skirted its edge, patient.

Outside a flake floated down out of the dark pocket of packed clouds, then another and yet another, like timid kisses blown down upon the clownish brow of Broadway. A motorman shielded his eyes from the right merry whirl and swore in his throat. A fruit-cheeked girl paused in the flare of a Mammoth Store show-window, looked up at her lover and the flaky star that lit and died on his mustache, and laughed with the musical glee of a bird. A beggar slid farther out from his doorway and pushed his hat into the flux of the sidewalk. More flakes, dancing upward like suds blown in merriment from the palm of a hand—light, lighter, mad, madder, weaving a blanket from God's own loom, from God's own fleece, whitening men's shoulders with the heavenly fabric.

Mrs. Violet Smith cast startled eyes upon the powdered shoulders and snow-clumped shoes passing down the aisleway, and her hand flew to her throat as if to choke its gasp.

"My! It ain't snowin', is it? It ain't snowin'?"

Mr. Jimmie Fitzgibbons wormed back to the counter. His voice was sunk to the golden mezzo of an amorous whisper.

"Snowin' is right, Doll! A real dyed-in-the-wool white Christmas for you and me!"

"Snowin'!"

"Don't you like snow, baby doll? Cheer up, I'm going to hire a taxicab by the hour. I'm—"

"Snowin'!"

She breathed inward, shivering, stricken, and her mouth, no older than a child's, trembled at the corners and would not be composed.

"He—he can't stand no snow-storm. That's why the doctor said if—if we could get him South before the first one, if we could get him South before the first one—South, where the sun shines and he could feel it clear through him, he—Oh, ain't I—ain't I in a mess!"

"Poor little filly!" He focused his small eyes upon her plump and throbbing throat. "Poor little filly, all winded!"

"I—oh, I—"

"There's the bell, Doll. Poor, tired little girlie, hurry and I'll buy you a taxicab. Hear it—there's the closing bell! Merry Christmas, Doll! Merry Christmas!"

A convulsion tore through the store, like the violent asthma of a thirty-thousand-ton ocean liner breathing the last breath of her voyage and slipping alongside her pier. On that first stroke of ten a girl behind the candy-counter collapsed frankly, rocking her left foot in her lap, pressing its blains, and blubbering through her lips salty with her own bitter tears. A child, qualified by legislation and his fourteen years to brace his soft-boned shoulder against the flank of life, bent his young spine double to the weight of two iron exit doors that swung outward and open. A gale of snow and whistling air danced in. The crowd turned about, faced, thinned, died.

Mrs. Violet Smith turned a rose-white face to the flurry. "Snowin'!"

"A real, made-to-order white Christmas for you and me, Doll. The kind you read about."

"It—it don't mean nothing to me, but—"

"Sure, it does; I'm goin' to blow you right, Doll. Half the money is yourn, anyways. You made that winning down in Atlanta yesterday as much as me, girlie. If I hadn't named that filly after you she'd 'a' been left at the post."

"You—you never had the right to name one of your race-horses after me. There ain't a girl ever went out with you that you 'ain't named one after. You—you never had the right to!"

"I took it, kiddo, 'cause I like you! Gad! I like you! Nix, it ain't every little girl I'd name one of my stable after. 'Violet!'—some little pony that, odds ag'in her and walks off with the money."

"I—honest, I sometimes—I—just wish I was dead!"

"No, you don't, Doll. You know you just wanna go to-night, but you 'ain't got the nerve. I wanna show you a Christmas Eve that'll leave any Christmas Eve you ever spent at the post. Gad! look out there, will you? I'm going to taxicab you right through the fuzz of that there snow-storm if it costs every cent the filly won for us!"

Mrs. Smith leaned back against the shelves limp, as if the blood had run from her heart, weakening her, but her eyes the color of lake-water when summer's moment is bluest. Her lips, that were meant to curve, straightened in a line of decision.

"I'll go, Jimmie."

"That's the goods!"

"A girl's just gotta have something to hold herself together, don't she? It—it ain't like the kid and Harry was layin' awake for me—last Tuesday they was both asleep when I got home. They don't let each other get lonesome, and Harry—he—There ain't nothing much for me to do round home."

"Now you're talkin' the English language, Doll."

"I'll go, Jimmie."

He extended his cane at a sharper angle until it bent in upon itself, threatening to snap, and flung one gray-spatted ankle across the other.

"Sure, you're going! A poor little filly like you, sound-kneed, sound-winded, and full of speed, and no thin' but trouble for your Christmas stockin'. A poor little blue-eyed doll like you!"

"A girl's gotta have something! You knew me before I was married, Jimmie, and there never was a girl more full of life."

"Sure I knew you. But you was a little cold-storage queen and turned me down."

"He—Harry, he never asks me nothing when I come in, and the kid's asleep, anyways."

"Color up there a little, Doll. Where I'm going to take you there ain't nothing but live ones. I'm going to take you to a place where the color scheme of your greenbacks has got to be yellow. Color up there, Doll. You ain't going dead, are you?"

She stretched open her eyes to wide, laughing pools, plowed through the rear-counter debris of pasteboard boxes and tissue-paper, reached for her jacket and tan, boyish hat. A blowy, corn-colored curl caught like a tendril and curled round the brim.

"Going dead! Say, my middle name is Speed! It's like Harry used to tell me when we wasn't no farther along in the marriage game than his sneaking over here from the gents' furnishing three times a day to price bill-folders—he used to say that I was a live wire before Franklin flew his kite."

"Doll!"

"I ain't tired, Jimmie. Not countin' the year and a half I was home before Harry took sick, I been through the Christmas hell just six times. The seventh don't mean nothing in my life. I've seen 'em behind these very counters cursing Christmas with tears in their eyes and spending their merry holiday in bed trying to get some of the soreness out. It takes more than one Christmas to put me out of business."

"Here, lemme tuck that curl in for you, Doll."

"Quit!"

"Doll!"

"Quit, I say!"

"Color up there, girlie. Look live!"

She rubbed her palms briskly across her cheeks to generate a glow, and they warmed to color as peaches blush to the kiss of the sun.