"There you go again! I tell you, Millie, you're going to nag me with that once too often. Then ain't now. What you homesick for? Your poor-as-a-church-mouse days? I been pretty patient these last two years, feeling like a funeral every time I put my foot in the front door—"

"It ain't often you put it in."

"But, mark my word, you're going to nag me once too often!"

"O God! Harry, I try to keep in! I know how wild it makes you—how busy you are, but—"

"A man that's give to a woman heaven on earth like I have you! A man that started three years ago on nothing but nerve and a few dollars, and now stands on two feet, one of the biggest spectacle-producers in the business! By Gad! you're so darn lucky it's made a loon out of you! Get out more. Show yourself a good time. You got the means and the time. Ain't there no way to satisfy you?"

"I can't do things alone all the time, Harry. I—I'm funny that way. I ain't a woman like that, a new-fangled one that can do things without her husband. It's the nights that kill me—the nights. The—all nights sitting here alone—waiting."

"If you 'ain't learned the demands of my business by now, I'm not going over them again."

"Yes; but not all—"

"You ought to have some men to deal with. I'd like to see Mrs. Unger try to dictate to him how to run his business."

"You've left me behind, Harry. I—try to keep up, but—I can't. I ain't the woman to naturally paint my hair this way. It's my trying to keep up, Harry, with you and—and—Edwin. These clothes—I ain't right in 'em, Harry; I know that. That's why I can't stand it. The suspense. The waiting up nights. I tell you I'm going crazy. Crazy with knowing I'm left behind."

"I never told you to paint up your hair like a freak."

"I thought, Harry—the color—like hers—it might make me seem younger—"

"You thought! You're always thinking."

She stood behind him now over the couch, her hand yearning toward but not touching him.

"O God! Harry, ain't there no way I can please you no more—no way?"

"You can please me by acting like a human being and not getting me home on wild-goose chases like this."

"But I can't stand it, Harry! The quiet. Nobody to do for. You always gone. Edwin. The way the servants—laugh. I ain't smart enough, like some women. I got to show it—that my heart's breaking."

"Go to matinees; go—"

"Tell me how to make myself like Alma Zitelle to you, Harry. For God's sake, tell me!"

He looked away from her, the red rising up above the rear of his collar.

"You're going to drive me crazy desperate, too, some day, on that jealousy stuff. I'm trying to do the right thing by you and hold myself in, but—there's limits."

"Harry, it—ain't jealousy. I could stand anything if I only knew. If you'd only come out with it. Not keep me sitting here night after night, when I know you—you're with her. It's the suspense, Harry, as much as anything is killing me. I could stand it, maybe, if I only knew. If I only knew!"

He sprang up, wheeling to face her across the couch.

"You mean that?"

"Harry!"

"Well, then, since you're the one wants it, since you're forcing me to it—I'll end your suspense, Millie. Yes. Let me go, Millie. There's no use trying to keep life in something that's dead. Let me go."

She stood looking at him, cheeks cased in palms, and her sagging eye-sockets seeming to darken, even as she stared.

"You—her—"

"It happens every day, Millie. Man and woman grow apart, that's all. Your own son is man enough to understand that. Nobody to blame. Just happens."

"Harry—you mean—"

"Aw, now, Millie, it's no easier for me to say than for you to listen. I'd sooner cut off my right hand than put it up to you. Been putting it off all these months. If you hadn't nagged—led up to it, I'd have stuck it out somehow and made things miserable for both of us. It's just as well you brought it up. I—Life's life, Millie, and what you going to do about it?"

A sound escaped her like the rising moan of a gale up a flue; then she sat down against trembling that seized her and sent ripples along the iridescent sequins.

"Harry—Alma Zitelle—you mean—Harry?"

"Now what's the use going into all that, Millie? What's the difference who I mean? It happened."

"Harry, she—she's a common woman."

"We won't discuss that."

"She'll climb on you to what she wants higher up still. She won't bring you nothing but misery, Harry. I know what I'm saying; she'll—"

"You're talking about something you know nothing about—you—"

"I do. I do. You're hypnotized, Harry. It's her looks. Her dressing like a snake. Her hair. I can get mine fixed redder 'n hers, Harry. It takes a little time. Mine's only started to turn, Harry, is why it don't look right yet to you. This dress, it's from her own dressmaker. Harry—I promise you I can make myself like—her—I promise you, Harry—"

"For God's sake, Millie, don't talk like—that! It's awful! What's those things got to do with it? It's—awful!"

"They have, Harry. They have, only a man don't know it. She's a bad woman, Harry—she's got you fascinated with the way she dresses and does—"

"We won't go into that."

"We will. We will. I got the right. I don't have to let you go if I don't want to. I'm the mother of your son. I'm the wife that was good enough for you in the days when you needed her. I—"

"You can't throw that up to me, Millie. I've squared that debt."

"She'll throw you over, Harry, when I'll stand by you to the crack of doom. Take my word for it, Harry. O God! Harry, please take my word for it!"

She closed her streaming eyes, clutching at his sleeve in a state beyond her control. "Won't you please? Please!"

He toed the carpet.

"I—I'd sooner be hit in the face, Millie, than—have this happen. Swear I would! But you see for yourself we—we can't go on this way."

She sat for a moment, her stare widening above the palm clapped tightly against her mouth.

"Then you mean, Harry, you want—you want a—a—"

"Now, now, Millie, try to keep hold of yourself. You're a sensible woman. You know I'll do the right thing by you to any amount. You'll have the boy till he's of age, and after that, too, just as much as you want him. He'll live right here in the flat with you. Money's no object, the way I'm going to fix things. Why, Millie, compared to how things are now—you're going to be a hundred per cent, better off—without me."

She fell to rocking herself in the straight chair.

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!"

"Now, Millie, don't take it that way. I know that nine men out of ten would call me crazy to—to let go of a woman like you. But what's the use trying to keep life in something that's dead? It's because you're too good for me, Millie. I know that. You know that it's not because I think any less of you, or that I've forgot it was you who gave me my start. I'd pay you back ten times more if I could. I'm going to settle on you and the boy so that you're fixed for life. When he's of age, he comes into the firm half interest. There won't even be no publicity the way I'm going to fix things. Money talks, Millie. You'll get your decree without having to show your face to the public."

"O God—he's got it all fixed—he's talked it all over with her! She—"

"You—you wouldn't want to force something between you and me, Millie; that—that's just played out—"

"I done it myself. I couldn't let well enough alone. I was ambitious for 'em. I dug my own grave. I done it myself. Done it myself!"

"Now, Millie, you mustn't look at things that way. Why, you're the kind of a little woman all you got to have is something to mother over. I'm going to see to it that the boy is right here at home with you all the time. He can give up those rooms at the college—you got as fine a son as there is in the country, Millie—I'm going to see to it that he is right here at home with you—"

"O God—my boy—my little boy—my little boy!"

"The days are over, Millie, when this kind of thing makes any difference. If it was—the mother—it might be different, but where the father is—to blame—it don't matter with the boy. Anyways, he's nearly of age. I tell you, Millie, if you'll just look at this thing sensible—"

"I—Let me think, let—me—think."

Her tears had quieted now to little dry moans that came with regularity. She was still swaying in her chair, eyes closed.

"You'll get your decree, Millie, without—."

"Don't talk," she said, a frown lowering over her closed eyes and pressing two fingers against each temple. "Don't talk."

He walked to the window in a state of great perturbation, stood pulling inward his lips and staring down into the now brilliantly lighted flow of Broadway. Turned into the room with short, hasty strides, then back again. Came to confront her.

"Aw, now, Millie—Millie—" Stood regarding her, chewing backward and forward along his fingertips. "You—you see for yourself, Millie, what's dead can't be made alive—now, can it?"

She nodded, acquiescing, her lips bitterly wry.

"My lawyer, Millie, he'll fix it, alimony and all, so you won't—"

"O God!"

"Suppose I just slip away easy, Millie, and let him fix up things so it'll be easiest for us both. Send the boy down to see me to-morrow. He's old enough and got enough sense to have seen things coming. He knows. Suppose—I just slip out easy, Millie, for—for—both of us. Huh, Millie?"

She nodded again, her lips pressed back against outburst.

"If ever there was a good little woman, Millie, and one that deserves better than me, it's—"

"Don't!" she cried. "Don't—don't—don't!"

"I—"

"Go—quick—now!"

He hesitated, stood regarding her there in the chair, eyes squeezed closed like Iphigenia praying for death when exiled in Tauris.

"Millie—I—"

"Go!" she cried, the wail clinging to her lips.

He felt round for his hat, his gaze obscured behind the shining glasses, tiptoed out round the archipelago of too much furniture, groped for the door-handle, turning it noiselessly, and stood for the instant looking back at her bathed in the rosy light and seated upright like a sleeping Ariadne; opened the door to a slit that closed silently after him.

She sat thus for three hours after, the wail still uppermost on the silence.

At ten o'clock, with a gust that swayed the heavy drapes, her son burst in upon the room, his stride kicking the door before he opened it. Six feet in his gymnasium shoes, and with a ripple of muscle beneath the well-fitting, well-advertised Campus Coat for College Men, he had emerged from the three years into man's complete estate, which, at nineteen, is that patch of territory at youth's feet known as "the world." Gray eyed, his dark lashes long enough to threaten to curl, the lean line of his jaw squaring after the manner of America's fondest version of her manhood, he was already in danger of fond illusions and fond mommas.

"Hello, mother!" he said, striding quickly through the chairs and over to where she sat.

"Edwin!"

"Thought I'd sleep home to-night, mother."

He kissed her lightly, perking up her shoulder butterflies of green sequins, and standing off to observe.

"Got to hand it to my little mother for quiet and sumptuous el-e-gance! Some classy spangy-wangles!" He ran his hand against the lay of the sequins, absorbed in a conscious kind of gaiety.

She moistened her lips, trying to smile.

"Oh, boy," she said—"Edwin!"—holding to his forearm with fingers that tightened into it.

"Mother," he said, pulling at his coat lapels with a squaring of shoulders, "you—you going to be a dead game little sport?"

She was looking ahead now, abstraction growing in her white face.

"Huh?"

He fell into short strides up and down the length of the couch front.

"I—I guess I might have mentioned it before, mother, but—but—oh, hang!—when a fellow's a senior it—it's all he can do to get home once in a while and—and—what's the use talking about a thing anyway before it breaks right, and—well, everybody knows it's up to us college fellows—college men—to lead the others and show our country what we're made of now that she needs us—eh, little dressed-up mother?"

She looked up at him with the tremulous smile still trying to break through.

"My boy can mix with the best of 'em."

"That's not what I mean, mother."

"You got to be twice to me what you been, darling—twice to me. Listen, darling. I—Oh, my God!"

She was beating softly against his hand held in hers, her voice rising again, and her tears.

"Listen, darling—"

"Now, mother, don't go into a spell. The war is going to help you out on these lonesome fits, mother. Like Slawson put it to-day in Integral Calculus Four, war reduces the personal equation to its lowest terms—it's a matter of—."

"I need you now, Edwin—O God! how I need you! There never was a minute in all these months since you've grown to understand how—it is between your father and me that I needed you so much—"

"Mother, you mustn't make it harder for me to—tell you what I—"

"I think maybe something has happened to me, Edwin. I can feel myself breathe all over—it's like I'm outside of myself somewhere—"

"It's nervousness, mother. You ought to get out more. I'm going to get you some war-work to do, mother, that 'll make you forget yourself. Service is what counts these days!"

"Edwin, it's come—he's leaving me—it—"

"Speaking of service, I—I guess I might have mentioned it before, mother, but—but—when war was declared the other day, a—a bunch of us fellows volunteered for—for the university unit to France, and—well, I'm accepted, mother—to go. The lists went up to-night. I'm one of the twenty picked fellows."

"France?"

"We sail for Bordeaux for ambulance service the twentieth, mother. I was the fourth accepted with my qualifications—driving my own car and—and physical fitness. I'm going to France, mother, among the first to do my bit. I know a fellow got over there before we were in the war and worked himself into the air-fleet. That's what I want, mother, air service! They're giving us fellows credit for our senior year just the same. Bob Vandaventer and Clarence Unger and some of the fellows like that are in the crowd. Are you a dead-game sport, little mother, and not going to make a fuss—"

"I—don't know. What—is—it—I—"

"Your son at the front, mother, helping to make the world a safer place for democracy. Does a little mother with something like that to bank on have time to be miserable over family rows? You're going to knit while I'm gone. The busiest little mother a fellow ever had, doing her bit for her country! There's signs up all over the girls' campus: 'A million soldiers "out there" are needing wool jackets and chest-protectors. How many will you take care of?' You're going to be the busiest little mother a fellow ever had. You're going to stop making a fuss over me and begin to make a fuss over your country. We're going into service, mother!"

"Don't leave me, Edwin! Baby darling, don't leave me! I'm alone! I'm afraid."

"There, there, little mother," he said, patting at her and blinking, "I—Why—why, there's men come back from every war, and plenty of them. Good Lord! just because a fellow goes to the front, he—"

"I got nothing left. Everything I've worked for has slipped through my life like sand through a sieve. My hands are empty. I've lost your father on the success I slaved for. I'm losing my boy on the fine ideas and college education I've slaved for. I—Don't leave me, Edwin. I'm afraid—Don't—"

"Mother—I—Don't be cut up about it. I—"

"Why should I give to this war? I ain't a fine woman with the fine ideas you learn at college. I ask so little of life—just some one who needs me, some one to do for. I 'ain't got any fine ideas about a son at war. Why should I give to what they're fighting for on the other side of the ocean? Don't ask me to give up my boy to what they're fighting for in a country I've never seen—my little boy I raised—my all I've got—my life! No! No!"

"It's the women like you, mother—with guts—with grit—that send their sons to war."

"I 'ain't got grit!"

"You're going to have your hands so full, little mother, taking care of the Army and Navy, keeping their feet dry and their chests warm, that before you know it you'll be down at the pier some fine day watching us fellows come home from victory."

"No—no—no!"

"You're going to coddle the whole fighting front, making 'em sweaters and aviation sets out of a whole ton of wool I'm going to lay in the house for you. Time's going to fly for my little mother."

"I'll kill myself first!"

"You wouldn't have me a quitter, little mother. You wouldn't have the other fellows in my crowd at college go out and do what I haven't got the guts to do. You want me to hold up my head with the best of 'em."

"I don't want nothing but my boy! I—"

"Us college men got to be the first to show that the fighting backbone of the country is where it belongs. If us fellows with education don't set the example, what can we expect from the other fellows? Don't ask me to be a quitter, mother. I couldn't! I wouldn't! My country needs us, mother—you and me—"

"Edwin! Edwin!"

"Attention, little mother—stand!"

She lay back her head, laughing, crying, sobbing, choking.

"O God—take him and bring him back—to me!"

On a day when sky and water were so identically blue that they met in perfect horizon, the S. S. Rowena, sleek-flanked, mounted fore and aft with a pair of black guns that lifted snouts slightly to the impeccable blue, slipped quietly, and without even a newspaper sailing-announcement into a frivolous midstream that kicked up little lace edged wavelets, undulating flounces of them. A blur of faces rose above deck-rails, faces that, looking back, receded finally. The last flag and the last kerchief became vapor. Against the pier-edge, frantically, even perilously forward, her small flag thrust desperately beyond the rail, Mrs. Ross, who had lost a saving sense of time and place, leaned after that ship receding in majesty, long after it had curved from view.

The crowd, not a dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly, thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city. Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing out and quivering for the smell of war. Finally, he too, turned back reluctantly.

Now only Mrs. Ross. An hour she stood there, a solitary figure at the rail, holding to her large black hat, her skirts whipped to her body and snapping forward in the breeze. The sun struck off points from the water, animating it with a jewel-dance. It found out in a flash the diamond-and-sapphire top to her gold-mesh hand-bag, hoppity-skippiting from facet to facet.

"My boy—my little boy!"

A pair of dock-hands, wiping their hands on cotton-waste, came after a while to the door of the pier-house to observe and comment. Conscious of that observation, she moved then through the great dank sheds in and among the bales and boxes, down a flight of stairs and out to the cobbled street. Her motor-car, the last at the entrance, stood off at a slant, the chauffeur lopping slightly and dozing, his face scarcely above the steering-wheel. She passed him with unnecessary stealth, her heels occasionally wedging between the cobbles and jerking her up. Two hours she walked thus, invariably next to the water's edge or in the first street running parallel to it. Truck-drivers gazed at and sang after her. Deck- and dock-hands, stretched out in the first sun of spring, opened their eyes to her passing, often staring after her under lazy lids. Behind a drawn veil her lips were moving, but inaudibly now. Motor-trucks, blocks of them, painted the gray of war, stood waiting shipment, engines ready to throb into no telling what mire. Once a van of knitted stuffs, always the gray, corded and bound into bales, rumbled by, close enough to graze and send her stumbling back. She stood for a moment watching it lumber up alongside a dock.

It was dusk when she emerged from the rather sinister end of West Street into Battery Park, receding in a gracious new-green curve from the water. Tier after tier of lights had begun to prick out in the back-drop of skyscraping office-buildings. The little park, after the six-o'clock stampede, settled back into a sort of lamplit quiet, dark figures, the dregs of a city day, here and there on its benches. The back-drop of office-lights began to blink out then, all except the tallest tower in the world, rising in the glory of its own spotlight into a rococo pinnacle of man's accomplishment.

Strolling the edge of that park so close to the water that she could hear it seethe in the receding, a policeman finally took to following Mrs. Ross, his measured tread behind hers, his night-stick rapping out every so often. She found out a bench then, and never out of his view, sat looking out across the infinitude of blackness to where the bay so casually meets the sea. Night dampness had sent her shivering, the plumage of her hat, the ferny feathers of the bird-of-paradise, drooping almost grotesquely over the brim.

A small detachment of Boy Scouts, sturdy with an enormous sense of uniform and valor, marched through the asphalt alleys of the park with trained, small-footed, regimental precision—small boys with clean, lifted faces. A fife and drum came up the road.

Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!

High over the water a light had come out—Liberty's high-flung torch. Watching it, and quickened by the fife and drum to an erect sitting posture, Mrs. Ross slid forward on her bench, lips opening. The policeman standing off, rapped twice, and when she rose, almost running toward the lights of the Elevated station, followed.

Within her apartment on upper Broadway, not even a hall light burned when she let herself in with her key. At the remote end of the aisle of blackness a slit of yellow showed beneath the door, behind it the babble of servants' voices.

She entered with a stealth that was well under cover of those voices, groping into the first door at her right, feeling round for the wall key, switching the old rose-and-gold room into immediate light. Stood for a moment, her plumage drooping damply to her shoulders, blue foulard dress snagged in two places, her gold mesh bag with the sapphire-and-diamond top hanging low from the crook of her little finger. A clock ticked with almost an echo into the rather vast silence.

She entered finally, sidling in among the chairs.

A great mound of gray yarn, uncut skein after uncut skein of it, rose off the brocade divan, more of them piled in systematic pyramids on three chairs. She dropped at sight of it to the floor beside the couch, burying her face in its fluff, grasping it in handfuls, writhing into it. Surges of merciful sobs came sweeping through and through her.

After a while, with a pair of long amber-colored needles, she fell to knitting with a fast, even furious ambidexterity, her mouth pursing up with a driving intensity, her boring gaze so concentrated on the thing in hand that her eyes seemed to cross.

Dawn broke upon her there, her hat still cockily awry, tears dried in a vitrified gleaming down her cheeks. Beneath her flying fingers, a sleeveless waistcoat was taking shape, a soldier's inner jacket against the dam of trenches. At sunup it lay completed, spread out as if the first of a pile. The first noises of the city began to rise remotely. A bell pealed off somewhere. Day began to raise its conglomerate voice. On her knees beside the couch there, the second waistcoat was already taking shape beneath the cocksure needles.

The old pinkly moist look had come out in her face.

One million boys "out there" were needing chest-protectors!



III

ICE-WATER, PL—!

When the two sides of every story are told, Henry VIII. may establish an alibi or two, Shylock and the public-school system meet over and melt that too, too solid pound of flesh, and Xantippe, herself the sturdier man than Socrates, give ready, lie to what is called the shrew in her. Landladies, whole black-bombazine generations of them—oh, so long unheard!—may rise in one Indictment of the Boarder: The scarred bureau-front and match-scratched wall-paper; the empty trunk nailed to the floor in security for the unpaid bill; cigarette-burnt sheets and the terror of sudden fire; the silent newcomer in the third floor back hustled out one night in handcuffs; the day-long sobs of the blond girl so suddenly terrified of life-about-to-be and wringing her ringless hands in the fourth-floor hall-room; the smell of escaping gas and the tightly packed keyhole; the unsuspected flutes that lurk in boarders' trunks; towels, that querulous and endless paean of the lodger; the high cost of liver and dried peaches, of canned corn and round steak!

Tired bombazine procession, wrapped in the greasy odors of years of carpet-sweeping and emptying slops, airing the gassy slit of room after the coroner; and padding from floor to floor on a mission of towels and towels and towels!

Sometimes climbing from floor to floor, a still warm supply of them looped over one arm, Mrs. Kaufman, who wore bombazine, but unspotted and with crisp net frills at the throat, and upon whose soft-looking face the years had written their chirography in invisible ink, would sit suddenly, there in the narrow gloom of her halls, head against the balustrade. Oftener than not the Katz boy from the third floor front would come lickety-clapping down the stairs and past her, jumping the last four steps of each flight.

"Irving, quit your noise in the hall."

"Aw!"

"Ain't you ashamed, a big boy like you, and Mrs. Suss with her neuralgia?"

"Aw!"—the slam of a door clipping off this insolence.

After a while she would resume her climb.

And yet in Mrs. Kaufman's private boarding-house in West Eighty-ninth Street, one of a breastwork of brownstone fronts, lined up stoop for stoop, story for story, and ash-can for ash-can, there were few enough greasy odors except upon the weekly occasion of Monday's boiled dinner; and, whatever the status of liver and dried peaches, canned corn and round steak, her menus remained static—so static that in the gas-lighted basement dining-room and at a remote end of the long, well-surrounded table Mrs. Katz, with her napkin tucked well under her third chin, turned sotto from the protruding husband at her right to her left neighbor, shielding her remark with her hand.

"Am I right, Mrs. Finshriber? I just said to my husband in the five years we been here she should just give us once a change from Friday-night lamb and noodles."

"Say, you should complain yet! With me it's six and a half years day after to-morrow, Easter Day, since I asked myself that question first."

"Even my Irving says to me to-night up in the room; jumping up and down on the hearth like he had four legs—"

"I heard him, Mrs. Katz, on my ceiling like he had eight legs."

"'Mamma,' he says, 'guess why I feel like saying "Baa."'"

"Saying what?"

"Sheep talk, Mrs. Finshriber. B-a-a, like a sheep goes."

"Oh!"

"'Cause I got so many Friday nights' lamb in me, mamma,' he said. Quick like a flash that child is."

Mrs. Finshriber dipped her head and her glance, all her drooping features pulled even farther down at their corners. "I ain't the one to complain, Mrs. Katz, and I always say, when you come right down to it maybe Mrs. Kaufman's house is as good as the next one, but—"

"I wish, though, Mrs. Finshriber, you would hear what Mrs. Spritz says at her boarding-house they get for breakfast: fried—"

"You can imagine, Mrs. Katz, since my poor husband's death, how much appetite I got left; but I say, Mrs. Katz, just for the principle of the thing, it would not hurt once if Mrs. Kaufman could give somebody else besides her own daughter and Vetsburg the white meat from everything, wouldn't it?"

"It's a shame before the boarders! She knows, Mrs. Pinshriber, how my husband likes breast from the chicken. You think once he gets it? No. I always tell him, not 'til chickens come doublebreasted like overcoats can he get it in this house, with Vetsburg such a star boarder."

"Last night's chicken, let me tell you, I don't wish it to a dog! Such a piece of dark meat with gizzard I had to swallow."

Mrs. Katz adjusted with greater security the expanse of white napkin across her ample bosom. Gold rings and a quarter-inch marriage band flashed in and out among the litter of small tub-shaped dishes surrounding her, and a pouncing fork of short, sure stab. "Right away my husband gets mad when I say the same thing. 'When we don't like it we should move,' he says."

"Like moving is so easy, if you got two chairs and a hair mattress to take with you. But I always say, Mrs. Katz, I don't blame Mrs. Kaufman herself for what goes on; there's one good woman if there ever was one!"

"They don't come any better or any better looking, my husband always says. 'S-ay,' I tell him, 'she can stand her good looks.'"

"It's that big-ideaed daughter who's to blame. Did you see her new white spats to-night?" Right away the minute they come out she has to have 'em. I'm only surprised she 'ain't got one of them red hats from Gimp's what is all the fad. Believe me, if not for such ideas, her mother could afford something better as succotash for us for supper."

"It's a shame, let me tell you, that a woman like Mrs. Kaufman can't see for herself such things. God forbid I should ever be so blind to my Irving. I tell you that Ruby has got it more like a queen than a boarding-housekeeper's daughter. Spats, yet!"

"Rich girls could be glad to have it always so good."

"I don't say nothing how her mother treats Vetsburg, her oldest boarder, and for what he pays for that second floor front and no lunches she can afford to cater a little; but that such a girl shouldn't be made to take up a little stenography or help with the housework!"

"S-ay, when that girl even turns a hand, pale like a ghost her mother gets."

"How girls are raised nowadays, even the poor ones!"

"I ain't the one to complain, Mrs. Katz, but just look down there, that red stuff."

"Where?"

"Ain't it cranberry between Ruby and Vetsburg?"

"Yes, yes, and look such a dish of it!"

"Is it right extras should be allowed to be brought on a table like this where fourteen other boarders got to let their mouth water and look at it?"

"You think it don't hurt like a knife! For myself I don't mind, but my Irving! How that child loves 'em, and he should got to sit at the same table without cranberries."

From the head of the table the flashing implements of carving held in askance for stroke, her lips lifted to a smile and a simulation of interest for display of further carnivorous appetites, Mrs. Kaufman passed her nod from one to the other.

"Miss Arndt, little more? No? Mr. Krakower? Gravy? Mrs. Suss? Mr. Suss? So! Simon? Mr. Schloss? Miss Horowitz? Mr. Vetsburg, let me give you this little tender—No? Then, Ruby, here let mama give you just a little more—"

"No, no, mama, please!" She caught at the hovering wrist to spare the descent of the knife.

By one of those rare atavisms by which a poet can be bred of a peasant or peasant be begot of poet, Miss Ruby Kaufman, who was born in Newark, posthumous, to a terrified little parent with a black ribbon at the throat of her gown, had brought with her from no telling where the sultry eyes and tropical-turned skin of spice-kissed winds. The corpuscles of a shah might have been running in the blood of her, yet Simon Kaufman, and Simon Kaufman's father before him, had sold wool remnants to cap-factories on commission.

"Ruby, you don't eat enough to keep a bird alive. Ain't it a shame, Mr. Vetsburg, a girl should be so dainty?"

Mr. Meyer Vetsburg cast a beetling glance down upon Miss Kaufman, there so small beside him, and tinked peremptorily against her plate three times with his fork. "Eat, young lady, like your mama wants you should, or, by golly! I'll string you up for my watch-fob—not, Mrs. Kaufman?"

A smile lay under Mr. Vetsburg's gray-and-black mustache. Gray were his eyes, too, and his suit, a comfortable baggy suit with the slouch of the wearer impressed into it, the coat hiking center back, the pocket-flaps half in, half out, and the knees sagging out of press.

"That's right, Mr. Vetsburg, you should scold her when she don't eat."

Above the black-bombazine basque, so pleasantly relieved at the throat by a V of fresh white net, a wave of color moved up Mrs. Kaufman's face into her architectural coiffure, the very black and very coarse skein of her hair wound into a large loose mound directly atop her head and pierced there with a ball-topped comb of another decade.

"I always say, Mr. Vetsburg, she minds you before she minds anybody else in the world."

"Ma," said Miss Kaufman, close upon that remark, "some succotash, please."

From her vantage down-table, Mrs. Katz leaned a bit forward from the line.

"Look, Mrs. Finshriber, how for a woman her age she snaps her black eyes at him. It ain't hard to guess when a woman's got a marriageable daughter—not?"

"You can take it from me she'll get him for her Ruby yet! And take it from me, too, almost any girl I know, much less Ruby Kaufman, could do worse as get Meyer Vetsburg."

"S-say, I wish it to her to get him. For why once in a while shouldn't a poor girl get a rich man except in books and choruses?"

"Believe me, a girl like Ruby can manage what she wants. Take it from me, she's got it behind her ears."

"I should say so."

"Without it she couldn't get in with such a crowd of rich girls like she does. I got it from Mrs. Abrams in the Arline Apartments how every week she plays five hundred with Nathan Shapiro's daughter."

"No! Shapiro & Stein?"

"And yesterday at matinee in she comes with a box of candy and laughing with that Rifkin girl! How she gets in with such swell girls, I don't know, but there ain't a nice Saturday afternoon I don't see that girl walking on Fifth Avenue with just such a crowd of fine-dressed girls, all with their noses powdered so white and their hats so little and stylish."

"I wouldn't be surprised if her mother don't send her down to Atlantic City over Easter again if Vetsburg goes. Every holiday she has to go lately like it was coming to her."

"Say, between you and me, I don't put it past her it's that Markovitch boy down there she's after. Ray Klein saw 'em on the boardwalk once together, and she says it's a shame for the people how they sat so close in a rolling-chair."

"I wouldn't be surprised she's fresh with the boys, but, believe me, if she gets the uncle she don't take the nephew!"

"Say, a clerk in his own father's hotel like the Markovitches got in Atlantic City ain't no crime."

"Her mother has got bigger thoughts for her than that. For why I guess she thinks her daughter should take the nephew when maybe she can get the uncle herself. Nowadays it ain't nothing no more that girls marry twice their own age."

"I always say I can tell when Leo Markovitch comes down, by the way her mother's face gets long and the daughter's gets short."

"Can you blame her? Leo Markovitch, with all his monograms on his shirt-sleeves and such black rims on his glasses, ain't the Rosenthal Vetsburg Hosiery Company, not by a long shot! There ain't a store in this town you ask for the No Hole Guaranteed Stocking, right away they don't show it to you. Just for fun always I ask."

"Cornstarch pudding! Irving, stop making that noise at Mrs. Kaufman! Little boys should be seen and not heard even at cornstarch pudding."

"Gott! Wouldn't you think, Mrs. Katz, how Mrs. Kaufman knows how I hate desserts that wabble, a little something extra she could give me."

"How she plays favorite, it's a shame. I wish you'd look, too, Mrs. Finshriber, how Flora Proskauer carries away from the table her glass of milk with slice bread on top. I tell you it don't give tune to a house the boarders should carry away from the table like that. Irving, come and take with you that extra piece cake. Just so much board we pay as Flora Proskauer."

The line about the table broke suddenly, attended with a scraping of chairs and after-dinner chirrupings attended with toothpicks. A blowsy maid strained herself immediately across the strewn table and cloying lamb platter, and turned off two of the three gas jets.

In the yellow gloom, the odors of food permeating it, they filed out and up the dim lit stairs into dim-lit halls, the line of conversation and short laughter drifting after.

A door slammed. Then another. Irving Katz leaped from his third floor threshold to the front hearth, quaking three layers of chandeliers. From Morris Krakower's fourth floor back the tune of a flute began to wind down the stairs. Out of her just-closed door Mrs. Finshriber poked a frizzled gray head.

"Ice-water, ple-ase, Mrs. Kauf-man."

At the door of the first floor back Mrs. Kaufman paused with her hand on the knob.

"Mama, let me run and do it."

"Don't you move, Ruby. When Annie goes up to bed it's time enough. Won't you come in for a while, Mr. Vetsburg?"

"Don't care if I do".

She opened the door, entering cautiously. "Let me light up, Mrs. Kaufman." He struck a phosphorescent line on the sole of his shoe, turning up three jets.

"You must excuse, Mr. Vetsburg, how this room looks. All day we've been sewing Ruby her new dress."

She caught up a litter of dainty pink frills in the making, clearing a chair for him.

"Sit down, Mr. Vetsburg."

They adjusted themselves around the shower of gaslight. Miss Kaufman fumbling in her flowered work-bag, finally curling her foot up under her, her needle flashing and shirring through one of the pink flounces.

"Ruby, in such a light you shouldn't strain your eyes."

"All right, ma," stitching placidly on.

"What'll you give me, Ruby, if I tell you whose favorite color is pink?"

"Aw, Vetsy!" she cried, her face like a rose, "your color's pink!"

From the depths of an inverted sewing-machine top Mrs. Kaufman fished out another bit of the pink, ruffling it with deft needle.

The flute lifted its plaintive voice, feeling for high C.

Mr. Vetsburg lighted a loosely wrapped cigar and slumped in his chair.

"If anybody," he observed, "should ask right this minute where I'm at, tell 'em for me, Mrs. Kaufman, I'm in the most comfortable chair in the house."

"You should keep it, then, up in your room, Mr. Vetsburg, and not always bring it down again when I get Annie to carry it up to you."

"Say, I don't give up so easy my excuse for dropping in evenings."

"Honest, you—you two children, you ought to have a fence built around you the way you like always to be together."

He sat regarding her, puffing and chewing his live cigar. Suddenly he leaped forward, his hand closing rigidly over hers.

"Mrs. Kaufman!"

"What?"

"Quick, there's a hole in your chin."

"Gott! a—a—what?"

At that he relaxed at his own pleasantry, laughing and shrugging. With small white teeth Miss Kaufman bit off an end of thread.

"Don't let him tease you, ma; he's after your dimple again."

"Ach, du—tease, you! Shame! Hole in my chin he scares me with!"

She resumed her work with a smile and a twitching at her lips that she was unable to control. A warm flow of air came in, puffing the lace curtains. A faint odor of departed splendor lay in that room, its high calcimined ceiling with the floral rosette in the center, the tarnished pier-glass tilted to reflect a great pair of walnut folding-doors which cut off the room where once it had flowed on to join the great length of salon parlor. A folding-bed with an inlay of mirror and a collapsible desk arrangement backed up against those folding-doors. A divan with a winding back and sleek with horsehair was drawn across a corner, a marble-topped bureau alongside. A bronze clock ticked roundly from the mantel, balanced at either side by a pair of blue-glass cornucopias with warts blown into them.

Mrs. Kaufman let her hands drop idly in her lap and her head fell back against the chair. In repose the lines of her mouth turned up, and her throat, where so often the years eat in first, was smooth and even slender above the rather round swell of bosom.

"Tired, mommy?"

"Always around Easter spring fever right away gets hold of me!"

Mr. Vetsburg bit his cigar, slumped deeper; and inserted a thumb in the arm of his waistcoat.

"Why, Mrs. Kaufman, don't you and Ruby come down by Atlantic City with me to-morrow over Easter? Huh? A few more or less don't make no difference to my sister the way they get ready for crowds."

Miss Kaufman shot forward, her face vivid.

"Oh, Vetsy," she cried, and a flush rushed up, completely dyeing her face. His face lit with hers, a sunburst of fine lines radiating from his eyes.

"Eh?"

"Why—why, we—we'd just love it, wouldn't we, ma? Atlantic City, Easter Day! Ma!"

Mrs. Kaufman sat upright with a whole procession of quick emotions flashing their expressions across her face. They ended in a smile that trembled as she sat regarding the two of them.

"I should say so, yes! I—You and Ruby go, Mr. Vetsburg. Atlantic City, Easter Day, I bet is worth the trip. I—You two go, I should say so, but you don't want an old woman to drag along with you."

"Ma! Just listen to her, Vetsy! Ain't she—ain't she just the limit? Half the time when we go in stores together they take us for sisters, and then she—she begins to talk like that to get out of going!"

"Ruby don't understand; but it ain't right, Mr. Vetsburg, I should be away over Saturday and Sunday. On Easter always they expect a little extra, and with Annie's sore ankle, I—I—"

"Oh, mommy, can't you leave this old shebang for only two days just for an Easter Sunday down at Atlantic, where—where everybody goes?"

"You know yourself, Ruby, how always on Annie's Sunday out—"

"Well, what of it? It won't hurt all of them old things upstairs that let you wait on them hand and foot all year to go without a few frills for their Easter dinner."

"Ruby!"

"I mean it. The old gossip-pots! I just sat and looked at them there at supper, and I said to myself, I said, to think they drown kittens and let those poor lumps live!"

"Ruby, aren't you ashamed to talk like that?"

"Sat there and looked at poor old man Katz with his ear all ragged like it had been chewed off, and wondered why he didn't just go down to Brooklyn Bridge for a high jump."

"Ruby, I—"

"If all those big, strapping women, Suss and Finshriber and the whole gang of them, were anything but vegetables, they'd get out and hustle with keeping house, to work some of their flabbiness off and give us a chance to get somebody in besides a chocolate-eating, novel-reading crowd of useless women who think, mommy, you're a dumbwaiter, chambermaid, lady's maid, and French chef rolled in one! Honest, ma, if you carry that ice-water up to Katz to-night on the sly, with that big son of hers to come down and get it, I—I'll go right up and tell her what I think of her if she leaves to-morrow."

"Mr. Vetsburg, you—you mustn't listen to her."

"Can't take a day off for a rest at Atlantic City, because their old Easter dinner might go down the wrong side. Honest, mama, to—to think how you're letting a crowd of old, flabby women that aren't fit even to wipe your shoes make a regular servant out of you! Mommy!"

There were tears in Miss Kaufman's voice, actual tears, big and bright, in her eyes, and two spots of color had popped out in her cheeks.

"Ruby, when—when a woman like me makes her living off her boarders, she can't afford to be so particular. You think it's a pleasure I can't slam the door right in Mrs. Katz's face when six times a day she orders towels and ice-water? You think it's a pleasure I got to take sass from such a bad boy like Irving? I tell you, Ruby, it's easy talk from a girl that doesn't understand. Ach, you—you make me ashamed before Mr. Vetsburg you should run down to the people we make our living off of."

Miss Kaufman flashed her vivid face toward Mr. Vetsburg, still low there in his chair. She was trembling. "Vetsy knows! He's the only one in this house does know! He 'ain't been here with us ten years, ever since we started in this big house, not—not to know he's the only one thinks you're here for anything except impudence and running stairs and standing sass from the bad boys of lazy mothers. You know, don't you, Vetsy?"

"Ruby! Mr. Vetsburg, you—you must excuse—"

From the depths of his chair Mr. Vetsburg's voice came slow and carefully weighed. "My only complaint, Mrs. Kaufman, with what Ruby has got to say is it ain't strong enough. It maybe ain't none of my business, but always I have told you that for your own good you're too gemuetlich. No wonder every boarder what you got stays year in and year out till even the biggest kickers pay more board sooner as go. In my business, Mrs. Kaufman, it's the same, right away if I get too easy with—"

"But, Mr. Vetsburg, a poor woman can't afford to be so independent. I got big expenses and big rent; I got a daughter to raise—"

"Mama, haven't I begged you a hundred times to let me take up stenography and get out and hustle so you can take it easy—haven't I?"

A thick coating of tears sprang to Mrs. Kaufman's eyes and muddled the gaze she turned toward Mr. Vetsburg. "Is it natural, Mr. Vetsburg, a mother should want her only child should have always the best and do always the things she never herself could afford to do? All my life, Mr. Vetsburg, I had always to work. Even when I was five months married to a man what it looked like would some day do big things in the wool business, I was left all of a sudden with nothing but debts and my baby."

"But, mama—"

"Is it natural, Mr. Vetsburg, I should want to work off my hands my daughter should escape that? Nothing, Mr. Vetsburg, gives me so much pleasure she should go with all those rich girls who like her well enough poor to be friends with her. Always when you take her down to Atlantic City on holidays, where she can meet 'em, it—it—"

"But, mommy, is it any fun for a girl to keep taking trips like that with—with her mother always at home like a servant? What do people think? Every holiday that Vetsy asks me, you—you back out. I—I won't go without you, mommy, and—and I want to go, ma, I—I want to!"

"My Easter dinner and—"

"You, Mrs. Kaufman, with your Easter dinner! Ruby's right. When your mama don't go this time not one step we go by ourselves—ain't it?"

"Not a step."

"But—"

"To-morrow, Mrs. Kaufman, we catch that one-ten train. Twelve o'clock I call in for you. Put ginger in your mama, Ruby, and we'll open her eyes on the boardwalk—not?"

"Oh, Vetsy!"

He smiled, regarding her.

Tears had fallen and dried on Mrs. Kaufman's cheeks; she wavered between a hysteria of tears and laughter.

"I—children—" She succumbed to tears, daubing her eyes shamefacedly.

He rose kindly. "Say, when such a little thing can upset her it's high time she took for herself a little rest. If she backs out, we string her up by the thumbs—not, Ruby?"

"We're going, ma. Going! You'll love the Markovitchs' hotel, ma dearie, right near the boardwalk, and the grandest glassed-in porch and—and chairs, and—and nooks, and things. Ain't they, Vetsy?"

"Yes, you little Ruby, you," he said, regarding her with warm, insinuating eyes, even crinkling an eyelid in a wink.

She did not return the glance, but caught her cheeks in the vise of her hands as if to stem the too quick flush. "Now you—you quit!" she cried, flashing her back upon him in quick pink confusion.

"She gets mad yet," he said, his shoulders rising and falling in silent laughter.

"Don't!"

"Well," he said, clicking the door softly after him, "good night and sleep tight."

"'Night, Vetsy."

Upon the click of that door Mrs. Kaufman leaned softly forward in her chair, speaking through a scratch in her throat. "Ruby!"

With her flush still high, Miss Kaufman danced over toward her parent, then as suddenly ebbed in spirit, the color going. "Why, mommy, what—what you crying for, dearie? Why, there's nothing to cry for, dearie, that we're going off on a toot to-morrow. Honest, dearie, like Vetsy says, you're all nerves. I bet from the way Suss hollered at you to-day about her extra milk you're upset yet. Wouldn't I give her a piece of my mind, though! Here, move your chair, mommy, and let me pull down the bed."

"I—I'm all right, baby. Only I just tell you it's enough to make anybody cry we should have a friend like we got in Vetsburg. I—I tell you, baby, they just don't come better than him. Not, baby? Don't be ashamed to say so to mama."

"I ain't, mama! And, honest, his—his whole family is just that way. Sweet-like and generous. Wait till you see the way his sister and brother-in-law will treat us at the hotel to-morrow. And—and Leo, too."

"I always say the day what Meyer Vetsburg, when he was only a clerk in the firm, answered my furnished-room advertisement was the luckiest day in my life."

"You ought to heard, ma. I was teasing him the other day, telling him that he ought to live at the Savoy, now that he's a two-thirds member of the firm."

"Ruby!"

"I was only teasing, ma. You just ought to seen his face. Any day he'd leave us!"

Mrs. Kaufman placed a warm, insinuating arm around her daughter's slim waist, drawing her around the chair-side and to her. "There's only one way, baby, Meyer Vetsburg can ever leave me and make me happy when he leaves."

"Ma, what you mean?"

"You know, baby, without mama coming right out in words."

"Ma, honest I don't. What?"

"You see it coming just like I do. Don't fool mama, baby."

The slender lines of Miss Kaufman's waist stiffened, and she half slipped from the embrace.

"Now, now, baby, is it wrong a mother should talk to her own baby about what is closest in both their hearts?"

"I—I—mama, I—I don't know!"

"How he's here in this room every night lately, Ruby, since you—you're a young lady. How right away he follows us up-stairs. How lately he invited you every month down at Atlantic City. Baby, you ain't blind, are you?"

"Why, mama—why, mama, what is Meyer Vetsburg to—to me? Why, he—he's got gray hair, ma; he—he's getting bald. Why, he—he don't know I'm on earth. He—he's—"

"You mean, baby, he don't know anybody else is on earth. What's, nowadays, baby, a man forty? Why—why, ain't mama forty-one, baby, and didn't you just say yourself for sisters they take us?"

"I know, ma, but he—he—. Why, he's got an accent, ma, just like old man Katz and—and all of 'em. He says 'too-sand' for thousand. He—"

"Baby, ain't you ashamed like it makes any difference how a good man talks?" She reached out, drawing her daughter by the wrists down into her lap. "You're a bad little flirt, baby, what pretends she don't know what a blind man can see."

Miss Kaufman's eyes widened, darkened, and she tugged for the freedom of her wrists. "Ma, quit scaring me!"

"Scaring you! That such a rising man like Vetsburg, with a business he worked himself into president from clerk, looks every day more like he's falling in love with you, should scare you!"

"Ma, not—not him!"

In reply she fell to stroking the smooth black plaits, wound coronet fashion about Miss Kaufman's small head. Large, hot tears sprang to her eyes. "Baby, when you talk like that it's you that scares mama!"

"He—he—"

"Why, you think, Ruby, I been making out of myself a servant like you call it all these years except for your future? For myself a smaller house without such a show and maybe five or six roomers without meals, you think ain't easier as this big barn? For what, baby, you think I always want you should have extravagances maybe I can't afford and should keep up with the fine girls what you meet down by Atlantic City if it ain't that a man like Meyer Vetsburg can be proud to choose you from the best?"

"Mama! mama!"

"Don't think, Ruby, when the day comes what I can give up this white-elephant house that it won't be a happy one for me. Every night when I hear from up-stairs how Mrs. Katz and all of them hollers down 'towels' and 'ice-water' to me like I—I was their slave, don't think, baby, I won't be happiest woman in this world the day what I can slam the door, bang, right on the words."

"Mama, mama, and you pretending all these years you didn't mind!"

"I don't, baby. Not one minute while I got a future to look forward to with you. For myself, you think I ask anything except my little girl's happiness? Anyways, when happiness comes to you with a man like Meyer Vetsburg, don't—don't it come to me, too, baby?"

"Please, I—"

"That's what my little girl can do for mama, better as stenography. Set herself down well. That's why, since we got on the subject, baby, I—I hold off signing up the new lease, with every day Shulif fussing so. Maybe, baby, I—well, just maybe—eh, baby?"

For answer a torrent of tears so sudden that they came in an avalanche burst from Miss Kaufman, and she crumpled forward, face in hands and red rushing up the back of her neck and over her ears.

"Ruby!"

"No, no, ma! No, no!"

"Baby, the dream what I've dreamed five years for you!"

"No, no, no!"

She fell back, regarding her.

"Why, Ruby. Why, Ruby, girl!"

"It ain't fair. You mustn't!"

"Mustn't?"

"Mustn't! Mustn't!" Her voice had slipped up now and away from her.

"Why, baby, it's natural at first maybe a girl should be so scared. Maybe I shouldn't have talked so soon except how it's getting every day plainer, these trips to Atlantic City and—"

"Mama, mama, you're killing me." She fell back against her parent's shoulder, her face frankly distorted.

A second, staring there into space, Mrs. Kaufman sat with her arm still entwining the slender but lax form. "Ruby, is—is it something you ain't telling mama?"

"Oh, mommy, mommy!"

"Is there?"

"I—I don't know."

"Ruby, should you be afraid to talk to mama, who don't want nothing but her child's happiness?"

"You know, mommy. You know!"

"Know what, baby?"

"I—er—"

"Is there somebody else you got on your mind, baby?"

"You know, mommy."

"Tell mama, baby. It ain't a—a crime if you got maybe somebody else on your mind."

"I can't say it, mommy. It—it wouldn't be—be nice."

"Nice?"

"He—he—We ain't even sure yet."

"He?"

"Not—yet."

"Who?"

"You know."

"So help me, I don't."

"Mommy, don't make me say it. Maybe if—when his uncle Meyer takes him in the business, we—"

"Baby, not Leo?"

"Oh, mommy, mommy!" And she buried her hot, revealing face into the fresh net V.

"Why—why, baby, a—a boy like that!"

"Twenty-three, mama, ain't a boy!"

"But, Ruby, just a clerk in his father's hotel, and two older brothers already in it. A—a boy that 'ain't got a start yet."

"That's just it, ma. We—we're waiting! Waiting before we talk even—even much to each other yet. Maybe—maybe his uncle Meyer is going to take him in the business, but it ain't sure yet. We—"

"A little yellow-haired boy like him that—that can't support you, baby, unless you live right there in his mother's and father's hotel away—away from me!"

"Ma!"

"Ruby, a smart girl like you. A little snip what don't make salt yet, when you can have the uncle hisself!"

"I can't help it, ma! If—if—the first time Vetsy took me down to—to the shore, if—if Leo had been a king or a—or just what he is, it wouldn't make no difference. I—I can't help my—my feelings, ma. I can't!"

A large furrow formed between Mrs. Kaufman's eyes, darkening her.

"You wouldn't, Ruby!" she said, clutching her.

"Oh, mommy, mommy, when a—a girl can't help a thing!"

"He ain't good enough for you, baby!"

"He's ten times too good; that—that's all you know about it. Mommy, please! I—I just can't help it, dearie. It's just like when I—I saw him a—a clock began to tick inside of me. I—"

"O my God!" said Mrs. Kaufman, drawing her hand across her brow.

"His uncle Meyer, ma, 's been hinting all along he—he's going to give Leo his start and take him in the business. That's why we—we're waiting without saying much, till it looks more like—like we can all be together, ma."

"All my dreams! My dreams I could give up the house! My baby with a well-to-do husband maybe on Riverside Drive. A servant for herself, so I could pass, maybe, Mrs. Suss and Mrs. Katz by on the street. Ruby, you—you wouldn't, Ruby. After how I've built for you!"

"Oh, mama, mama, mama!"

"If you 'ain't got ambitions for yourself, Ruby, think once of me and this long dream I been dreaming for—us."

"Yes, ma. Yes."

"Ruby, Ruby, and I always thought when you was so glad for Atlantic City, it was for Vetsburg; to show him how much you liked his folks. How could I know it was—."

"I never thought, mommy. Why—why, Vetsy he's just like a relation or something."

"I tell you, baby, it's just an idea you got in your head."

"No, no, mama. No, no."

Suddenly Mrs. Kaufman threw up her hands, clasping them tight against her eyes, pressing them in frenzy. "O my God!" she cried. "All for nothing!" and fell to moaning through her laced fingers. "All for nothing! Years. Years. Years."

"Mommy darling!"

"Oh—don't, don't! Just let me be. Let me be. O my God! My God!"

"Mommy, please, mommy! I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it, mommy darling."

"I can't go on all the years, Ruby. I'm tired. Tired, girl."

"Of course you can't, darling. We—I don't want you to. 'Shh-h-h!"

"It's only you and my hopes in you that kept me going all these years. The hope that, with some day a good man to provide for you, I could find a rest, maybe."

"Yes, yes."

"Every time what I think of that long envelope laying there on that desk with its lease waiting to be signed to-morrow, I—I could squeeze my eyes shut so tight and wish I didn't never have to open them again on this—this house and this drudgery. If you marry wrong, baby, I'm caught. Caught in this house like a rat in a trap."

"No, no, mommy. Leo, he—his uncle—"

"Don't make me sign that new lease, Ruby. Shulif hounds me every day now. Any day I expect he says is my last. Don't make me saddle another five years with the house. He's only a boy, baby, and years it will take, and—I'm tired, baby. Tired! Tired!" She lay back with her face suddenly held in rigid lines and her neck ribbed with cords.

At sight of her so prostrate there, Ruby Kaufman grasped the cold face in her ardent young hands, pressing her lips to the streaming eyes.

"Mommy, I didn't mean it. I didn't! I—We're just kids, flirting a little, Leo and me. I didn't mean it, mommy!"

"You didn't mean it, Ruby, did you? Tell mama you didn't."

"I didn't, ma. Cross my heart. It's only I—I kinda had him in my head. That's all, dearie. That's all!"

"He can't provide, baby."

"'Shh-h-h, ma! Try to get calm, and maybe then—then things can come like you want 'em. 'Shh-h-h, dearie! I didn't mean it. 'Course Leo's only a kid. I—We—Mommy dear, don't. You're killing me. I didn't mean it. I didn't."

"Sure, baby? Sure?"

"Sure."

"Mama's girl," sobbed Mrs. Kaufman, scooping the small form to her bosom and relaxing. "Mama's own girl that minds."

They fell quiet, cheek to cheek, staring ahead into the gaslit quiet, the clock ticking into it.

The tears had dried on Mrs. Kaufman's cheeks, only her throat continuing to throb and her hand at regular intervals patting the young shoulder pressed to her. It was as if her heart lay suddenly very still in her breast.

"Mama's own girl that minds."

"It—it's late, ma. Let me pull down the bed."

"You ain't mad at mama, baby? It's for your own good as much as mine. It is unnatural a mother should want to see her—"

"No, no, mama. Move, dearie. Let me pull down the bed. There you are. Now!"

With a wrench Mrs. Kaufman threw off her recurring inclination to tears, moving casually through the processes of their retirement.

"To-morrow, baby, I tighten the buttons on them new spats. How pretty they look."

"Yes, dearie."

"I told Mrs. Katz to-day right out her Irving can't bring any more his bicycle through my front hall. Wasn't I right?"

"Of course you were, ma."

"Miss Flora looked right nice in that pink waist to-night—not? Four-eighty-nine only, at Gimp's sale."

"She's too fat for pink."

"You get in bed first, baby, and let mama turn out the lights."

"No, no, mama; you."

In her white slip of a nightdress, her coronet braids unwound and falling down each shoulder, even her slightness had waned. She was like Juliet who at fourteen had eyes of maid and martyr.

They crept into bed, grateful for darkness.

The flute had died out, leaving a silence that was plaintive.

"You all right, baby?"

"Yes, ma." And she snuggled down into the curve of her mother's arm. "Are you, mommy?"

"Yes, baby."

"Go to sleep, then."

"Good night, baby."

"Good night, mommy."

Silence.

Lying there, with her face upturned and her eyes closed, a stream of quiet tears found their way from under Miss Kaufman's closed lids, running down and toward her ears like spectacle frames.

An hour ticked past, and two damp pools had formed on her pillow.

"Asleep yet, baby?"

"Almost, ma."

"Are you all right?"

"Fine."

"You—you ain't mad at mama?"

"'Course not, dearie."

"I—thought it sounded like you was crying."

"Why, mommy, 'course not! Turn over now and go to sleep."

Another hour, and suddenly Mrs. Kaufman shot out her arm from the coverlet, jerking back the sheet and feeling for her daughter's dewy, upturned face where the tears were slashing down it.

"Baby!"

"Mommy, you—you mustn't!"

"Oh, my darling, like I didn't suspicion it!"

"It's only—"

"You got, Ruby, the meanest mama in the world. But you think, darling, I got one minute's happiness like this?"

"I'm all right, mommy, only—"

"I been laying here half the night, Ruby, thinking how I'm a bad mother what thinks only of her own—"

"No, no, mommy. Turn over and go to sl—"

"My daughter falls in love with a fine, upright young man like Leo Markovitch, and I ain't satisfied yet! Suppose maybe for two or three years you ain't so much on your feet. Suppose even his uncle Meyer don't take him in. Don't any young man got to get his start slow?"

"Mommy!"

"Because I got for her my own ideas, my daughter shouldn't have in life the man she wants!"

"But, mommy, if—"

"You think for one minute, Ruby, after all these years without this house on my hands and my boarders and their kicks, a woman like me would be satisfied? Why, the more, baby, I think of such a thing, the more I see it for myself! What you think, Ruby, I do all day without steps to run, and my gedinks with housekeeping and marketing after eighteen years of it? At first, Ruby, ain't it natural it should come like a shock that you and that rascal Leo got all of a sudden so—so thick? I—It ain't no more, baby. I—I feel fine about it."

"Oh, mommy, if—if I thought you did!"

"I do. Why not? A fine young man what my girl is in love with. Every mother should have it so."

"Mommy, you mean it?"

"I tell you I feel fine. You don't need to feel bad or cry another minute. I can tell you I feel happy. To-morrow at Atlantic City if such a rascal don't tell me for himself, I—I ask him right out!"

"Ma!"

"For why yet he should wait till he's got better prospects, so his mother-in-law can hang on? I guess not!"

"Mommy darling. If you only truly feel like that about it. Why, you can keep putting off the lease, ma, if it's only for six months, and then we—we'll all be to—"

"Of course, baby. Mama knows. Of course!"

"He—I just can't begin to tell you, ma, the kind of a fellow Leo is till you know him better, mommy dear."

"Always Vetsburg says he's a wide-awake one!"

"That's just what he is, ma. He's just a prince if—if there ever was one. One little prince of a fellow." She fell to crying softly, easy tears that flowed freely.

"I—I can tell you, baby, I'm happy as you."

"Mommy dear, kiss me."

They talked, huddled arm in arm, until dawn flowed in at the window and dirty roofs began to show against a clean sky. Footsteps began to clatter through the asphalt court and there came the rattle of milk-cans.

"I wonder if Annie left out the note for Mrs. Suss's extra milk!"

"Don't get up, dearie; it's only five—"

"Right away, baby, with extra towels I must run up to Miss Flora's room. That six o'clock-train for Trenton she gets."

"Ma dear, let me go."

"Lay right where you are! I guess you want you should look all worn out when a certain young man what I know walks down to meet our train at Atlantic City this afternoon, eh?"

"Oh, mommy, mommy!" And Ruby lay back against the luxury of pillows.

At eleven the morning rose to its climax—the butcher, the baker, and every sort of maker hustling in and out the basementway; the sweeping of upstairs halls; windows flung open and lace curtains looped high; the smell of spring pouring in even from asphalt; sounds of scrubbing from various stoops; shouts of drivers from a narrow street wedged with its Saturday-morning blockade of delivery wagons, and a crosstown line of motor-cars, tops back and nosing for the speedway of upper Broadway. A homely bouquet of odors rose from the basement kitchen, drifting up through the halls, the smell of mutton bubbling as it stewed.

After a morning of up-stairs and down-stairs and in and out of chambers, Mrs. Kaufman, enveloped in a long-sleeved apron still angular with starch, hung up the telephone receiver in the hall just beneath the staircase and entered her bedroom, sitting down rather heavily beside the open shelf of her desk. A long envelope lay uppermost on that desk, and she took it up slowly, blinking her eyes shut and holding them squeezed tight as if she would press back a vision, even then a tear oozing through. She blinked it back, but her mouth was wry with the taste of tears.

A slatternly maid poked her head in through the open door. "Mrs. Katz broke 'er mug!"

"Take the one off Mr. Krakow's wash-stand and give it to her, Tillie."

She was crying now frankly, and when the door swung closed, even though it swung back again on its insufficient hinge, she let her head fall forward into the pillow of her arms, the curve of her back rising and falling.

But after a while the greengrocer came on his monthly mission, in his white apron and shirt-sleeves, and she compared stubs with him from a file on her desk and balanced her account with careful squinted glance and a keen eye for an overcharge on a cut of breakfast bacon.

On the very heels of him, so that they met and danced to pass each other in the doorway, Mr. Vetsburg entered, with an overcoat flung across his right arm and his left sagging to a small black traveling-bag.

"Well," he said, standing in the frame of the open door, his derby well back on his head and regarding her there beside the small desk, "is this what you call ready at twelve?"

She rose and moved forward in her crackly starched apron. "I—Please, Mr. Vetsburg, it ain't right, I know!"

"You don't mean you're not going!" he exclaimed, the lifted quality immediately dropping from his voice.

"You—you got to excuse me again, Mr. Vetsburg. It ain't no use I should try to get away on Saturdays, much less Easter Saturday."

"Well, of all things!"

"Right away, the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, right one things after another."

He let his bag slip to the floor.

"Maybe, Mrs. Kaufman," he said, "it ain't none of my business, but ain't it a shame a good business woman like you should let herself always be tied down to such a house like she was married to it?"

"But—"

"Can't get away on Saturdays, just like it ain't the same any other day in the week, I ask you! Saturday you blame it on yet!"

She lifted the apron from her hem, her voice hurrying. "You can see for yourself, Mr. Vetsburg, how in my brown silk all ready I was. Even—even Ruby don't know yet I don't go. Down by Gimp's I sent her she should buy herself one of them red straw hats is the fad with the girls now. She meets us down by the station."

"That's a fine come-off, ain't it, to disappoint—"

"At the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, how things can happen. Out of a clear sky Mrs. Finshriber has to-morrow for Easter dinner that skin doctor, Abrams, and his wife she's so particular about. And Annie with her sore ankle and—"

"A little shyster doctor like Abrams with his advertisements all over the newspapers should sponge off you and your holiday! By golly! Mrs. Kaufman, just like Ruby says, how you let a whole houseful of old hens rule this roost it's a shame!"

"When you go down to station, Mr. Vetsburg, so right away she ain't so disappointed I don't come, tell her maybe to-morrow I—."

"I don't tell her nothing!" broke in Mr. Vetsburg and moved toward her with considerable strengthening of tone. "Mrs. Kaufman, I ask you, do you think it right you should go back like this on Ruby and me, just when we want most you should—"

At that she quickened and fluttered. "Ruby and you! Ach, it's a old saying, Mr. Vetsburg, like the twig is bent so the tree grows. That child won't be so surprised her mother changes her mind. Just so changeable as her mother, and more, is Ruby herself. With that girl, Mr. Vetsburg, it's—it's hard to know what she does one minute from the next. I always say no man—nobody can ever count on a little harum-scarum like—like she is."

He took up her hat, a small turban of breast feathers, laid out on the table beside him, and advanced with it clumsily enough. "Come," he said, "please now, Mrs. Kaufman. Please."

"I—"

"I—I got plans made for us to-morrow down by the shore that's—that's just fine! Come now, Mrs. Kaufman."

"Please, Mr. Vetsburg, don't force. I—I can't! I always say nobody can ever count on such a little harum-scarum as—"

"You mean to tell me, Mrs. Kaufman, that just because a little shyster doctor—"

Her hand closed over the long envelope again, crunching it. "No, no, that—that ain't all, Mr. Vetsburg. Only I don't want you should tell Ruby. You promise me? How that child worries over little things. Shulif from the agency called up just now. He don't give me one more minute as two this afternoon I—I should sign. How I been putting them off so many weeks with this lease it's a shame. Always you know how in the back of my head I've had it to take maybe a smaller place when this lease was done, but, like I say, talk is cheap and moving ain't so easy done—ain't it? If he puts in new plumbing in the pantry and new hinges on the doors and papers my second floor and Mrs. Suss's alcove, like I said last night, after all I could do worse as stay here another five year—ain't it, Mr. Vetsburg?"

"I—"

"A house what keeps filled so easy, and such a location, with the Subway less as two blocks. I—So you see, Mr. Vetsburg, if I don't want I come back and find my house on the market, maybe rented over my head, I got to stay home for Shulif when he comes to-day."

A rush of dark blood had surged up into Mr. Vetsburg's face, and he twiddled his hat, his dry fingers moving around inside the brim.

"Mrs. Kaufman," he cried—"Mrs. Kaufman, sometimes when for years a man don't speak out his mind, sometimes he busts all of a sudden right out. I—Oh—e-e-e!" and, immediately and thickly inarticulate, made a tremendous feint at clearing his throat, tossed up his hat and caught it; rolled his eyes.

"Mr. Vetsburg?"

"A man, Mrs. Kaufman, can bust!"

"Bust?"

He was still violently dark, but swallowing with less labor. "Yes, from holding in. Mrs. Kaufman, should a woman like you—the finest woman in the world, and I can prove it—a woman, Mrs. Kaufman, who in her heart and my heart and—Should such a woman not come to Atlantic City when I got everything fixed like a stage set!"

She threw out an arm that was visibly trembling. "Mr. Vetsburg, for God's sake, 'ain't I just told you how that she—harum-scarum—she—."

"Will you, Mrs. Kaufman, come or won't you? Will you, I ask you, or won't you?"

"I—I can't, Mr.—"

"All right, then, I—I bust out now. To-day can be as good as to-morrow! Not with my say in a t'ousand years, Mrs. Kaufman, you sign that lease! I ain't a young man any more with fine speeches, Mrs. Kaufman, but not in a t'ousand years you sign that lease."

"Mr. Vetsburg, Ruby—I—"

"If anybody's got a lease on you, Mrs. Kaufman, I—I want it! I want it! That's the kind of a lease would suit me. To be leased to you for always, the rest of your life!"

She could not follow him down the vista of fancy, but stood interrogating him with her heartbeats at her throat. "Mr. Vetsburg, if he puts on the doors and hinges and new plumbing in—."

"I'm a plain man, Mrs. Kaufman, without much to offer a woman what can give out her heart's blood like it was so much water. But all these years I been waiting, Mrs. Kaufman, to bust out, until—till things got riper. I know with a woman like you, whose own happiness always is last, that first your girl must be fixed—."

"She's a young girl, Mr. Vetsburg. You—you mustn't depend—. If I had my say—."

"He's a fine fellow, Mrs. Kaufman. With his uncle to help 'em, they got, let me tell you, a better start as most young ones!"

She rose, holding on to the desk.

"I—I—" she said. "What?"

"Lena," he uttered, very softly.

"Lena, Mr. Vetsburg?"

"It 'ain't been easy, Lenie, these years while she was only growing up, to keep off my lips that name. A name just like a leaf off a rose. Lena!" he reiterated and advanced.

Comprehension came quietly and dawning like a morning.

"I—I—. Mr. Vetsburg, you must excuse me," she said, and sat down suddenly.

He crossed to the little desk and bent low over her chair, his hand not on her shoulder, but at the knob of her chair. His voice had a swift rehearsed quality.

"Maybe to-morrow, if you didn't back out, it would sound finer by the ocean, Lenie, but it don't need the ocean a man should tell a woman when she's the first and the finest woman in the world. Does it, Lenie?"

"I—I thought Ruby. She—"

"He's a good boy, Leo is, Lenie. A good boy what can be good to a woman like his father before him. Good enough even for a fine girl like our Ruby, Lenie—our Ruby!"

"Gott im Himmel! then you—"

"Wide awake, too. With a start like I can give him in my business, you 'ain't got to worry Ruby 'ain't fixed herself with the man what she chooses. To-morrow at Atlantic City all fixed I had it I should tell—"

"You!" she said, turning around in her chair to face him. "You—all along you been fixing—"

He turned sheepish. "Ain't it fair, Lenie, in love and war and business a man has got to scheme for what he wants out of life? Long enough it took she should grow up. I knew all along once those two, each so full of life and being young, got together it was natural what should happen. Mrs. Kaufman! Lenie! Lenie!"

Prom two flights up, in through the open door and well above the harsh sound of scrubbing, a voice curled down through the hallways and in. "Mrs. Kaufman, ice-water—ple-ase!"

"Lenie," he said, his singing, tingling fingers closing over her wrist.

"Mrs. Kauf-man, ice-water, pl—"

With her free arm she reached and slammed the door, let her cheek lie to the back of his hand, and closed her eyes.



IV

HERS NOT TO REASON WHY

In the third winter of a world-madness, with Europe guzzling blood and wild with the taste of it, America grew flatulent, stenching winds from the battle-field blowing her prosperity.

Granaries filled to bursting tripled in value, and, in congested districts, men with lean faces rioted when bread advanced a cent a loaf. Munition factories, the fires of destruction smelting all night, worked three shifts. Millions of shells for millions of dollars. Millions of lives for millions of shells. A country feeding into the insatiable maw of war with one hand, and with the other pouring relief-funds into coffers bombarded by guns of its own manufacture—quelling the wound with a finger and widening it with a knife up the cuff.

In France, women with blue faces and too often with the pulling lips of babes at dry breasts, learned the bitter tasks of sewing closed the coat sleeves and of cutting off and hemming the trousers leg at the knee.

In America, women new to the feel of fur learned to love it and not question whence it came. Men of small affairs, suddenly earthquaked to the crest of the great tidal wave of new market-values, went drunk with wealth.

In New York, where so many great forces of a great country coagulate, the face of the city photographed would have been a composite of fat and jowl, rouge and heavy lip—satiated yet insatiate, the head double-chinned and even a little loggy with too many satisfactions.

But that is the New York of the Saturnite and of Teufelsdroeckh alone with his stars.

Upon Mrs. Blutch Connors, gazing out upon the tide of West Forty-seventh Street, life lay lightly and as unrelated as if ravage and carnage and the smell of still warm blood were of another planet.

A shower of white light from an incandescent tooth-brush sign opposite threw a pallid reflection upon Mrs. Connors; it spun the fuzz of frizz rising off her blond coiffure into a sort of golden fog and picked out the sequins of her bodice.

The dinner-hour descends glitteringly upon West Forty-seventh Street, its solid rows of long, lanky hotels, actors' clubs, and sixty-cent tables d'hote adding each its candle-power.

From her brace of windows in the Hotel Metropolis, the street was not unlike a gully cut through mica, a honking tributary flowing into the great sea of Broadway. A low, high-power car, shaped like an ellipse, cut through the snarl of traffic, bleating. A woman, wrapped in a greatcoat of "baby" pelts and an almost undistinguishable dog in the cove of her arm, walked out from the Hotel Metropolis across the sidewalk and into a taxicab. An army of derby hats, lowered slightly into the wind, moved through the white kind of darkness. Standing there, buffeting her pink nails across her pink palms, Mrs. Connors followed the westward trend of that army. Out from it, a face lying suddenly back flashed up at her, a mere petal riding a swift current. But at sight of it Mrs. Blutch Connors inclined her entire body, pressing a smile and a hand against the cold pane, then turned inward, flashing on an electrolier—a bronze Nydia holding out a cluster of frosted bulbs. A great deal of the strong breath of a popular perfume and a great deal of artificial heat lay sweet upon that room, as if many flowers had lived and died in the same air, leaving insidious but slightly stale memories.

The hotel suite has become the brocaded tomb of the old-fashioned garden. The kitchen has shrunk into the chafing-dish, and all the dear old concoctions that mother used to try to make now come tinned, condensed, and predigested in sixty-seven varieties. Even the vine-covered threshold survives only in the booklets of promoters of suburban real estate. In New York, the home-coming spouse arrives on the vertical, shunted out at whatever his layer. Yet, when Mrs. Connors opened the door of her pink-brocaded sitting-room, her spirit rose with the soughing rise of the elevator, and Romance—hardy fellow—showed himself within a murky hotel corridor.

"Honeybunch!"

"Babe!" said Mr. Blutch Connors, upon the slam of the lift door.

And there, in the dim-lit halls, with its rows of closed doors in blank-faced witness thereof, they embraced, these two, despising, as Flaubert despised, to live in the reality of things.

"My boy's beau-ful cheeks all cold!"

"My girl's beau-ful cheeks all warm and full of some danged good cologne," said Mr. Connors, closing the door of their rooms upon them, pressing her head back against the support of his arm, and kissing her throat as the chin flew up.

He pressed a button, and the room sprang into more light, coming out pinkly and vividly—the brocaded walls pliant to touch with every so often a gilt-framed engraving; a gilt table with an onyx top cheerfully cluttered with the sauciest short-story magazines of the month; a white mantelpiece with an artificial hearth and a pink-and-gilt chaise-longue piled high with small, lacy pillows, and a very green magazine open and face downward on the floor beside it.

"Comin' better, honeybunch?"

"I dunno, Babe. The town's mad with money, but I don't feel myself going crazy with any of it."

"What ud you bring us, honey?"

He slid out of his silk-lined greatcoat, placing his brown derby atop.

"Three guesses, Babe," he said, rubbing his cold hands in a dry wash, and smiling from five feet eleven of sartorial accomplishment down upon her.

"Honey darlin'!" said Mrs. Connors, standing erect and placing her cheek against the third button of his waistcoat.

"Wow! how I love the woman!" he cried, closing his hands softly about her throat and tilting her head backward again.

"Darlin', you hurt!"

"Br-r-r—can't help it!"

When Mr. Connors moved, he gave off the scent of pomade freely; his slightly thinning brown hair and the pointy tips to a reddish mustache lay sleek with it. There was the merest suggestion of embonpoint to the waistcoat, but not so that, when he dropped his eyes, the blunt toes of his russet shoes were not in evidence. His pin-checked suit was pressed to a knife-edge, and his brocaded cravat folded to a nicety; there was an air of complete well-being about him. Men can acquire that sort of eupeptic well-being in a Turkish bath. Young mothers and life-jobbers have it naturally.

Suddenly, Mrs. Connors began to foray into his pockets, plunging her hand into the right, the left, then stopped suddenly, her little face flashing up at him.

"It's round and furry—my honeybunch brought me a peach! Beau-ful pink peach in December! Nine million dollars my hubby pays to bring him wifey a beau-ful pink peach." She drew it out—a slightly runty one with a forced blush—and bit small white teeth immediately into it.

"M-m-m!"—sitting on the chaise-longue and sucking inward. He sat down beside her, a shade graver.

"Is my babe disappointed I didn't dig her coat and earrings out of hock?"

She lay against him.

"I should worry!"

"There just ain't no squeal in my girl."

"Wanna bite?"

"Any one of 'em but you would be hollering for their junk out of pawn. But, Lord, the way she rigs herself up without it! Where'd you dig up the spangles, Babe? Gad! I gotta take you out to-night and buy you the right kind of a dinner. When I walks my girl into a cafe, they sit up and take notice, all righty. Spangles she rigs herself up in when another girl, with the way my luck's been runnin', would be down to her shimmy-tail."

She stroked his sleeve as if it had the quality of fur.

"Is the rabbit's foot still kicking my boy?"

"Never seen the like, honey. The cards just won't come. This afternoon I even played the wheel over at Chuck's, and she spun me dirt."

"It's gotta turn, Blutch."

"Sure!"

"Remember the run of rotten luck you had that year in Cincinnati, when the ponies was runnin' at Latonia?"

"Yeh."

"Lost your shirt, hon, and the first day back in New York laid a hundred on the wheel and won me my seal coat. You—we—We couldn't be no lower than that time we got back from Latonia, hon?"

He laid his hand over hers.

"Come on, Babe. Joe'll be here directly, and then we're going and blow them spangles to a supper."

"Blutch, answer!"

"Now there's nothin' to worry about, Babe. Have I ever landed anywhere but on my feet? We'll be driving a racer down Broadway again before the winter's over. There's money in motion these wartimes, Babe. They can't keep my hands off it."

"Blutch, how—how much did you drop to-day?

"I could tell clear down on the street you lost, honey, the way you walked so round-shouldered."

"What's the difference, honey? Come; just to show you I'm a sport, I'm going to shoot you and Joe over to Jack's in one of them new white taxi-cabs."

"Blutch, how much?"

"Well, if you gotta know it, they laid me out to-day, Babe. Dropped that nine hundred hock-money like it was a hot potato, and me countin' on bringin' you home your coat and junk again to-night. Gad! Them cards wouldn't come to me with salt on their tails."

"Nine hundred! Blutch, that—that leaves us bleached!"

"I know it, hon. Just never saw the like. Wouldn't care if it wasn't my girl's junk and fur coat. That's what hurts a fellow. If there's one thing he ought to look to, it's to keep his wimmin out of the game."

"It—it ain't that, Blutch; but—but where's it comin' from?"

He struck his thigh a resounding whack.

"With seventy-five bucks in my jeans, girl, the world is mine. Why, before I had my babe for my own, many's the time I was down to shoe-shine money. Up to 'leven years ago it wasn't nothing, honey, for me to sleep on a pool-table one night and de luxe the next. If life was a sure thing for me, I'd ask 'em to put me out of my misery. It's only since I got my girl that I ain't the plunger I used to be. Big Blutch has got his name from the old days, honey, when a dime, a dollar, and a tire-rim was all the same size."

She sat hunched up in the pink-satinet frock, the pink sequins dancing, and her small face smaller because of the way her light hair rose up in the fuzzy aura.

"Blutch, we—we just never was down to the last seventy-five before. That time at Latonia, it was a hundred and more."

"Why, girl, once, at Hot Springs, I had to hock my coat and vest, and I got started on a run of new luck playin' in my shirt-sleeves, pretending I was a summer boy."

"That was the time you gave Lenny Gratz back his losings and got him back to his wife."

"Right-o! Seen him only to-night. He's traveling out of Cleveland for an electric house and has forgot how aces up looks. That boy had as much chance in the game as a deacon."

Mrs. Connors laid hold of Mr. Connors's immaculate coat lapel, drawing him toward her.

"Oh, Blutch—honey—if only—if only—"

"If only what, Babe?"

"If you—you—"

"Why, honey, what's eatin' you? I been down pretty near this low many a time; only, you 'ain't known nothing about it, me not wanting to worry your pretty head. You ain't afraid, Babe, your old hubby can't always take care of his girl A1, are you?"

"No, no, Blutch; only—"

"What, Babe?"

"I wish to God you was out of it, Blutch! I wish to God!"

"Out of what, Babe?"

"The game, Blutch. You're too good, honey, and too—too honest to be in it. What show you got in the end against your playin' pals like Joe Kirby and Al Flexnor? I know that gang, Blutch. I've tried to tell you so often how, when I was a kid livin' at home, that crowd used to come to my mother's—"

"Now, now, girl; business is—"

"You're too good, Blutch, and too honest to be in it. The game'll break you in the end. It always does. Blutch darling, I wish to God you was out of it!"

"Why, Ann 'Lisbeth, I never knew you felt this way about it."

"I do, Blutch, I do! For years, it's been here in me—here, under my heart—eatin' me, Blutch, eatin' me!" And she placed her hands flat to her breast.

"Why, Babe!"

"I never let on. You—I—You been too good, Blutch, to a girl like—like I was for me to let out a whimper about anything. A man that took a girl like—like me that had knocked around just like—my mother and even—even my grandmother before me had knocked around—took and married me, no questions asked. A girl like me 'ain't got the right to complain to no man, much less to one like you. The heaven you've given me for eleven years, Blutch! The heaven! Sometimes, darlin', just sittin' here in a room like this, with no—no reason for bein' here—it's just like I—"

"Babe, Babe, you mustn't!"

"Sittin' here, waiting for you to come and not carin' for nothing or nobody except that my boy's comin' home to me—it's like I was in a dream, Blutch, and like I was going to wake up and find myself back in my mother's house, and—"

"Babe, you been sittin' at home alone too much. I always tell you, honey, you ought to make friends. Chuck De Roy's wife wants the worst way to get acquainted with you—a nice, quiet girl. It ain't right, Babe, for you not to have no friends at all to go to the matinee with or go buyin' knickknacks with. You're gettin' morbid, honey."

She worked herself out of his embrace, withholding him with her palms pressed out against his chest.

"I 'ain't got nothing in life but you, honey. There ain't nobody else under the sun makes any difference. That's why I want you to get out of it, Blutch. It's a dirty game—the gambling game. You ain't fit for it. You're too good. They've nearly got you now, Blutch. Let's get out, honey, while the goin's good. Let's take them seventy-five bucks and buy us a peanut-stand or a line of goods. Let's be regular folks, darlin'! I'm willin' to begin low down. Don't stake them last seventy-five, Blutch. Break while we're broke. It ain't human nature to break while your luck's with you."

He was for folding her in his arms, but she still withheld him.

"Blutch darlin', it's the first thing I ever asked of you."

He grew grave, looking long into her blue eyes with the tears forming over them.

"Why, Ann 'Lisbeth, danged if I know what to say! You sure you're feelin' well, Babe? 'Ain't took cold, have you, with your fur coat in hock?"

"No, no, no!"

"Well, I—I guess, honey, if the truth was told, your old man ain't cut out for nothing much besides the gamin'-table—a fellow that's knocked around the world the way I have."

"You are, Blutch; you are! You're an expert accountant. Didn't you run the Two Dollar Hat Store that time in Syracuse and get away with it?"

"I know, Babe; but when a fellow's once used to makin' it easy and spendin' it easy, he can't be satisfied lopin' along in a little business. Why, just take to-night, honey! I only brought home my girl a peach this evening, but that ain't sayin' that before morning breaks I can't be bringin' her a couple of two-carat stones."

"No, no, Blutch; I don't want 'em. I swear to God I don't want 'em!"

"Why, Babe, I just can't figure out what's got into you. I never heard you break out like this. Are you scared, honey, because we happen to be lower than—"

"No, no, darlin'; I ain't scared because we're low. I'm scared to get high again. It's the first run of real luck you've had in three years, Blutch. There was no hope of gettin' you out while things was breakin' good for you; but now—"

"I ain't sayin' it's the best game in the world. I'd see a son of mine laid out before I'd let him get into it. But it's what I'm cut out for, and what are you goin' to do about it? 'Ain't you got everything your little heart desires? Ain't we going down to Sheepshead when the first thaw sets in? Ain't we just a pair of love-birds that's as happy as if we had our right senses? Come, Babe; get into your jacket. Joe'll be here any minute, and I got that porterhouse at Jack's on the brain. Come kiss your hubby."

She held up her face with the tears rolling down it, and he kissed a dry spot and her yellow frizzed bangs.

"My girl! My cry-baby girl!"

"You're all I got in the world, Blutch! Thinkin' of what's best for you has eat into me."

"I know! I know!"

"We'll never get nowheres in this game, hon. We ain't even sure enough of ourselves to have a home like—like regular folks."

"Never you mind, Babe. Startin' first of the year, I'm going to begin to look to a little nest-egg."

"We ought to have it, Blutch. Just think of lettin' ourselves get down to the last seventy-five! What if a rainy day should come—where would we be at? If you—or me should get sick or something."

"You ain't all wrong, girl."

"You'd give the shirt off your back, Blutch; that's why we can't ever have a nest-egg as long as you're playin' stakes. There's too many hard-luck stories lying around loose in the gamblin' game."

"The next big haul I make I'm going to get out, girl, so help me!"

"Blutch!"

"I mean it. We'll buy a chicken-farm."

"Why not a little business, Blutch, in a small town with—"

"There's a great future in chicken-farmin'. I set Boy Higgins up with a five-hundred spot the year his lung went back on him, and he paid me back the second year."

"Blutch darlin', you mean it?"

"Why not, Babe—seein' you want it? There ain't no string tied to me and the green-felt table. I can go through with anything I make up my mind to."

"Oh, honey baby, you promise! Darling little fuzzy chickens!"

"Why, girl, I wouldn't have you eatin' yourself thisaway. The first ten-thou' high-water mark we hit I'm quits. How's that?"

"Ten thousand! Oh, Blutch, we—"

"What's ten thou', girl! I made the Hot Springs haul with a twenty-dollar start. If you ain't careful, we'll be buyin' that chicken-farm next week. That's what can happen to my girl if she starts something with her hubby."

Suddenly Mrs. Connors crumpled in a heap upon the lacy pillows, pink sequins heaving.

"Why, Babe—Babe, what is it? You're sick or something to-night, honey." He lifted her to his arms, bent almost double over her.