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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Lemme alone. I can see."

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

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

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

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

"Going for supper?"

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

"I don't want no supper."

"Aw, now, Dee Dee!"

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

"God! my feet!"

"Soak 'em."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeh, I know. I know."

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

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

"I should worry if you come home or if you don't—all the comfort you are to me."

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

"The sooner the better."

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

"That's just the way I feel about it—the sooner the better."

"Then we think alike."

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

"That's the thanks I get."

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

"Except what you begged out of my wages."

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

"That's the thanks I get; that's the—"

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

"You—you—take off that ivory-hand breast-pin; that ain't yours."

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

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

"I mean it."

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

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

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

"I just wish I—I was dead."

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

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

"Gimme—the key."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do I need my heavy coat, Jerry?"

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

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

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

"Gee! Jerry, you got the limousine top off. Ain't this swell for summer?"

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

She settled herself out of their range.

"Now, now, snuggle up a little, Peachy."

She shifted back to her first position.

"That's better."

"Ain't it a swell night?"

"Now we're comfy—eh?"

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

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

"Fine and—and dandy."

"Look at me."

"Aw!"

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

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

"Honest, you're the limit."

"What's your eyes red for?"

"They—they ain't."

"Cryin'?"

"Like fun."

"You know what I'd do if I thought you'd been crying? I'd just kiss them tears right away."

"Yes, you would not."

"Little devil!"

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

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

"Gad, George! you black devil you, why don't you watch out what you're doing?"

"But, suh, I—"

"None of your black back-talk."

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

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

"'Shh-h. He couldn't—"

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

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

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

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

"Quit."

She blinked back the ever-recurring tears.

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

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

"Gee! Ain't I the nut to—to cry? I—I'll be all right in a minute."

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

"N-no."

"The old hag 'ain't been making it hot for you, has she?"

"Sh-she—"

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

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

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

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

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

"But ain't I the limit, Jerry, airing my troubles to you, like you was a policeman."

"Now, now—"

"Quit! Leggo my hand."

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

"I got it. Why don't you lemme kidnap you, kiddo?"

"What—"

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

"Aw, you're just fooling me."

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

She withdrew stiff-backed against his embrace.

"Is—is that what you mean by—by kidnapping me?"

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

She sprang the width of the seat from him.

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

He leaned toward her with a quick readjustment of tone.

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

"You—you didn't mean that."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Jerry!"

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

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

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

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

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

"Ten rooms, Peachy—that's the way I do things."

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

She sat up and brushed back her hair.

"Is this the place?"

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

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

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

"Jerry!"

They alighted with an uncramping and unbending of limbs.

"How'd some Lynnhavens taste to you for a starter, Peachy?"

"Fine, whatever they are."

A liveried attendant bowed them up the steps.

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

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

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

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

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

"Gee—Jerry!"

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

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

"Who's that?"

"Me, Dee Dee."

Her voice was swathed in a whisper.

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

"All right, Dee Dee."

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

"It isn't late, Dee Dee."

"Light the gas."

"I—I can undress in the dark."

"Light the gas."

"I—"

"Light it, I say."

"It's lit, Dee Dee."

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

"Lit?"

"Dee Dee, what's the matter?"

"Gimme—my glasses."

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

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

"Dee Dee! My God! Dee Dee, I—I tell you it's lit—big."

"There's a good girl, Sadie. Don't fool your old aunt."

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

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

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

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

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

"God! God! God!"

"Dee Dee!—Dee Dee! my darling! my darling!"

"O God! O God! O God!"

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

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

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

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

"O God! Oh—"

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

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

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

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

They crouched closer and trembling.

"'Shh-h-h! Dee Dee, darling, try to be easy and not raise the house—try!"

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

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

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

"I know. I'm in the dark for good, Sadie. Oh, my God! I'm in the dark!"

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

"Lemme die! Lemme die!"

"'Shh-h-h—darling—That's it, rest quiet."

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

"Dee Dee darling, you—you hurt."

"You won't never leave me, Sadie, like you said you would? You won't leave me alone in the dark, Sadie?"

"No, no, my darling; you know I won't, never, never."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not yet. It's right around the next bend."

"Gee! My—my hands are like ice, I—I'm that nervous."

"Lemme feel."

"No."

"That's a swell way to treat a fellow who's promised to marry you."

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

"Don't think, Peachy; that's the way to get around that."

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

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

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

"Yeh, and poor old devil. Maybe she's just getting what's due to her."

"Jerry!"

"Sure, I believe every one of us gets what's coming to us."

"She—"

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

"Oh! Oh!"

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

"It's a beau-tiful house, Jerry."

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

"Where—"

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

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

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

She colored like a wild rose.

"Oh, Jerry, I—I keep forgetting."

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

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

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

"Aw, ain't she cute?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Don't force her, Jerry. She's bashful. Ain't you, dearie? Ain't you, Maisie?"

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

"Aw, Jerry, she can't help that!"

"Cat got your tongue? Where's Cloonan?"

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

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

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

"Aw, Jerry, honest, you can be awful mean!"

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

"She—"

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

Sadie Barnet smiled through the shadows in her eyes.

"Jerry! Say, ain't this beau-tiful! A upright piano and gold, chairs and—Why, Jerry! why, Jerry!"

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

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

"Jerry, it—it's just grand."

He marshaled her in all the pride of ownership.

"Look, butler's pantry, exposed plumbing."

"Oh! Oh!"

"Kitchen."

"Oh! Oh!"

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

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

"Howdy!"

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

"Yes, Jerry."

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

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

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

She broke from his embrace, confusion muddling her movements.

"Is this the—the spare room?"

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

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

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

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

"That's what they all say, but they get over it. I know a—"

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

He patted her shoulder and drew her arm through his.

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

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

His mouth sagged downward suddenly and on an oblique.

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

"Jerry, I—"

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

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

A frown gathered in a triple furrow on his brow.

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

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

"Now cut it, Peachy, I said, and cut it quick."

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

"God! I—I wanna go."

"Where?"

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

"I wanna go."

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

"Quit, you! I wanna go! I wanna go!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Little one, them remnants went like hot cakes, didn't they?"

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

"And if you don't look all tired out! If you just don't!"

The ready tears swam in her voice.

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

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

"M-me, too."

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

"God knows she—she wasn't."

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

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

"Now, now, little girl, don't cry! You're all worn out."

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

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

"No—no!"

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

'"Shh-h-h! You mustn't talk like that."

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

'"Shh-h-h!"

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

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

"Ain't I the dub? Sure you can't leave her. We gotta stick by her now, dearie. 'Ain't we? 'Ain't we?"

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

"We gotta stick by her, dearie."

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

"Oh—Mr. Meltzer—Max!"

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

"Max—oh, Max dearie!"



"HEADS"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Just ought to seen, Roody—honest, she laughed and nearly jerked off mamma's sheidel!" [Footnote: Black wig worn by orthodox Jewish women after marriage.]

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

"It's redder than yours already, Roody."

"She's sure a grand little thing cuddled up there, ain't it so, mammela?"

She reached up to pat his blue shirt-sleeve.

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

"And what for the little mammela?"

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

"When my girl gets to be a little mammela, the best shouldn't be none too good."

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

"You miss me in the shop, Roody?"

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

"I'll be back next week Monday."

He patted her quickly. "No! No! A mammela's place is with her baby."

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

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

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

"Now, Rosie, you mustn't worry yourself about such—"

"What you looking so funny for, Roody?"

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

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

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

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

"Rosie, you mustn't lift up that way!"

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

"Now, Rosie, wouldn't that keep until—"

"They have!"

"Well, if you got to know it, Rosie, they're shipping back the consignment."

"Roody!"

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

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

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

"It's a dirty shame! A big firm like Solomon & Glauber should not be allowed to—"

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

"Three countermands in a week, and no orders coming in!"

"Say, it don't tickle my ribs no more than yours."

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

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

"'Imagination.' He talks like a story-book."

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

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

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

"Ninety dollars to me is no cheap song, Roody."

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

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

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

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

"A living picture, with such neck and arms and—"

"That's enough, Roody! That's enough! I'm ashamed even for your daughter here!"

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

"Theyaters are no place for the poor."

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

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

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

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

"That's right—you'll have her riding in a horseless carriage next!"

"I tell you, it's a big idea!"

"I wish we had ten cents for every big idea you've been struck with."

"That's just why, Rosie, I'm going to hit one right."

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

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

"Sin nothing!"

"Our week-old little girl—it—"

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

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

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

"Roody—we mustn't!"

"Heads or tails, Rosie?"

"I—I—"

"Quick!"

"H-heads!"

"Quick now, papa's baby, open up little fist!"

"Roody, not so rough! She can't hold that big nickel."

"That's just what I want—she should let it fall."

"Roody, Roody, I hope it's tails."

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

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

"Roody—what?"

"Heads!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Just look! I'm all dressed already."

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

"Rosie, you've got them all beat! Guess why I wish I was your diamond necklace."

"Roody, it's nearly seven. Don't make me ashamed for Feist."

"Guess!"

"All right, then, I guess."

"So I could always be round your neck."

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

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

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

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

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

"I got your shirt and studs laid out myself."

He pinched her cheek again. "Rosie Posy!"

"You had a hard day, Roody? You look tired."

"I don't like the battle of Waterloo in the 'Saint Elba' picture."

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

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

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

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

"Fifty thousand dollars, Roody?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'Young lady'—all of a sudden she decides we've got! Young baby, you better say."

"A graduate this month from Miss Samuels's Central Park School he calls a baby!"

"Let me see—how old is—"

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

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

"You haven't noticed, Roody, David Feist?"

"'Noticed'?"

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

"You mean, Rosie—"

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

"You women with your nonsense!"

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

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

"You'd hate it, wouldn't you? A prince like David Feist."

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

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

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

"There! Didn't I tell you so? Didn't I?"

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

"Roody, the two estates together in one!"

"I'm surprised at you, Rosie—honest, I'm surprised. Such talk!"

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

"Go get dressed," she said, "and I'll wait for you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Good evening, Mr. Feist! It's a shame the way we kept you waiting."

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

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

"Roody, what a way to sit!"

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

"Roody!"

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

"You've got a gorgeous room here just the same, Pelz."

"Gorgeous for a funeral."

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

"Dunlap's are a grand firm of decorators, Mr. Feist. I'm having them do Grismer, too."

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

"Immense, Pelz!"

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

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

"Wonderful!"

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

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

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

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

"Roody, honest, you're awful!"

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

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

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

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

"Honey, a little supper wouldn't hurt."

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

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

"Now you're shouting, Feist!"

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

"Feist, her mother just hates that child!"

"Say, old man, I don't see any medals on you for hating her."

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

"You—you've got a beautiful, sweet little girl there, Pelz. I don't blame you."

"Feist, if I didn't know it, I'd be an ungrateful dog."

"Her papa can't realize, Mr. Feist, we haven't got a baby any more."

"I—realize it, Mrs. Pelz."

"You—you see, Roody?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She's already a year older than me when I married you, Roody."

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

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

"Bleema darling, you're just in time!"

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

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

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

"You little red head, you!"

"Stop it! Hold up your chin."

"Honey, we're all starvationed."

"Lester'll be here any minute now."

"Lester Spencer coming for dinner, Bleema?"

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

"I must tell Williams to lay another—"

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

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

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

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

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

"Isn't that just the sweetest picture, moms?"

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

"Sorry to say I have not."

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

"Say, Rosie, that's twice already Williams announced dinner is served."

"Overlooking the—"

"I hear Friedman & Kaplan made an assignment, Feist."

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

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

"Roody, cut up mamma's chicken for her. She trembles so."

"Moms, let Williams."

"No; she likes it when your father does it."

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

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

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

"Don't tease her, Roody; she likes to be let alone in public."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You mean a super for five a day takes the plunge."

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

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

"Brussels sprouts, dad."

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

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

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

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

"There's no center-stage left to hog with you in the picture, Spencer."

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

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

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

"It's not our fight, Mr. Feist."

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

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

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

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

"Lester Spencer, if you don't stop making eyes!"

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

"Little more of that ice-cream, Feist?"

"Thanks, Pelz; no."

"You, Lester?"

"Don't care if I do, Miss Bleema Butterfly."

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

"You're right, Mr. Pelz; I'd better be getting on."

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

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

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

"She sure did, Mrs. Pelz."

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

"But, dad, I promised."

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

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

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

"Ask your papa, Bleema; I—I don't know—"

"Dad?"

"You heard what I said, Bleema. No!"

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

"Poor child!" said Mrs. Pelz, stirring into her coffee. "She's so high strung."

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

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

"Me, too," he said, softly.

"Jealous!" flashed Mrs. Pelz.

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

"Sit down, baby, and drink your coffee."

"Don't want any."

"Williams, bring Miss Bleema some hot coffee."

"I'm finished, mother—please!"

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

"Please, mamma, Mr. Feist isn't interested."

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

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

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

"Why, Bleema!"

"Now, now, papa's girl—"

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

"Oh, grandma, make 'em let me alone!"

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

"Please, Mrs. Pelz, don't mind me; she's a little upset—that's all."

"You—you made me look like—like thirty cents before Lester Spencer—that—that's what you did."

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