"Go on!"
"He—he was in the cage, too; and—and you know how he looks when his eyes get little."
"Yes, yes, Izzy."
"They were—expert accountants with him. All day yesterday, Sunday, they were on my books; and—and they had me, Renie—they had me like a rat in a trap."
"Had you, Izzy?"
He drew himself upward, clutching at her arms; and the sobs began to tear him afresh. "They had me, Renie."
"Oh, Izzy, why—"
"I could have paid it back. I could have put it back if the old skinflint hadn't got to sniffing round and sicked 'em on my books. I could have won it all back in time, Renie. With my own uncle, my own mother's brother, it—it wasn't like I was stealing it, was it, Renie? Was it?"
"Oh, my God, Izzy!"
"It wasn't, Renie—my own uncle! I could have won it back if—if—"
"Won back what, Izzy—won back what?"
"I—I started with a hundred, Renie. I had to have it; I had to, I tell you. You remember that night I—I wanted you to go over and ask Aunt Beck for it? I had to have it. Pa—. I—I couldn't excite him any more about it; and—and I had to have it, I tell you, Renie."
"Yes; then what?"
"And I—I borrowed it without asking. I—I fixed it on my books so—soUncle Isadore wouldn't—couldn't—. I—I fixed it on my books."
"Oh-oh, Izzy! Oh—oh—oh!"
"I was trying out a system—a new one—and it worked, Renie. I tried it out on the new wheel down at Sharkey's and the seventeen system worked like a trick. I won big the first and second nights, Renie—you remember the night I brought you and ma the bracelets? I paid back the hundred the first week, Renie; and no one knew—no one knew."
"Oh-h-h-h!"
"The next Friday my luck turned on me—I never ought to have played on Friday—turned like a toad one unlucky Friday night. I got in deep before I knew it, and deeper and deeper; and then—and then it just seemed there wasn't no holding me, Renie. I got wild—got wild, I tell you; and I—I wrote 'em checks I didn't have no right to write. I—I went crazy, I tell you. Next day—you remember that morning I left the house so early?—I had to fix it with the books and borrow what—what I needed before the banks opened. I—I had to make good on them checks, Renie. I fixed it with the books, and from that time on it worked."
"Oh, Izzy—Izzy—Izzy!"
"I kept losing, Renie; but I knew, if my luck just changed from that unlucky Friday night, I could pay it back like the first time. All I needed was a little time and a little luck and I could pay it back like the first hundred; so I kept fixing my books, Renie, and—and borrowing more—and more."
"How much?"
"O God, Renie! I could have paid it back with time; I—"
"'Sh-h-h! How much, Izzy—how much?"
"Somebody must have snitched on me, how I was losing every night. The old skinflint, he—Oh, my God! They got me, Renie—they got me; and it'll kill the old man!"
"How much, Izzy—how much?"
"Oh, my God! I could have paid it back if—if—"
"How much? Tell me, I say!"
"Four—thousand!"
"Oh-h-h, Izzy—Izzy—Izzy!" She sprang back from him, blind with scalding tears. "Izzy! Four thousand! Oh, my God! Four thousand!"
"I could have paid it back, Renie; the system was all right, but—"
"Four thousand! Four thousand!"
"He—he was all for detaining me right away, Renie; sending for pa, and—and sicking the law right on his—his own sister's son. On my knees for three hours I had to beg, Renie—on my knees, for ma's sake and your sake and pa's—just for a little time I begged. A little time was all I begged. He don't care nothing for blood. I—I had to beg him, Renie, till—till I fainted."
"What shall we do, Izzy? What shall we do?"
"I squeezed two weeks' time out of him, Renie. Two weeks to pay it back or he puts the law on me—two weeks; and I got it from him like blood from a turnip. Oh, my God, Renie, four thousand in two weeks—four thousand in two weeks!"
He fell in a half-swoon against her skirts. Out of her arms she made a pillow of mercy and drew his head down to her bosom; and tears, bitter with salt, mingled with his, and her heart's blood buzzed in her brain.
"Izzy, Izzy! What have you done?"
"I can't pay it back, Renie. Where could I get half that much? I can't pay back four dollars, much less four thousand. I can't! I can't!"
"Four thousand!"
"We gotta keep it from the old man and ma, Renie. Let 'em kill me if they want to; but we gotta keep it from him and ma."
"Four thousand! Four thousand!"
In the half-light of the room, with the late sunshine pressing warm against the drawn green shades, the remote shouts of children coming to them through the quiet, and the whir of a lawn-mower off somewhere, they crouched, these two, as though they would shut their ears to the flapping of vultures' wings.
"They can't do anything to you, Izzy."
"What'll we do, Renie? What'll we do?"
"We got to find a way, Izzy."
"They can't send me up for it, Renie—say they can't!"
"No—no, dearie."
"I ain't crooked like that! It was my own uncle. They can't send me up,Renie. I'll kill myself first! I'll kill myself first!"
"Izzy, ain't you ashamed?" But it was as though the odor of death found its way to her nostrils, nauseating her. "Let me think. Let me think just a minute. Let me think." She rammed the ends of her fists tight against her eyes until Catherine wheels spun and spun against her lids. "Let me think just a minute."
"There's nobody, Renie—nobody—nobody—no way."
"Four—thousand!"
"No-body, I tell you, Renie. But I'll kill myself before I—"
Renie stood up. "Izzy! I will!"
He was whimpering frankly against her skirt. After a while she raised her face. Jeanne d'Arc might have looked like that when she beheld the vision.
"Squash!"
"What?"
"Squash! It's like he was sent out of heaven!"
"He—he ain't—"
"He's coming to-night—to ask me, Izzy. You know what I mean? Don't you see? Don't you see?"
"Don't you see, Izzy? He's going to ask me, and—and I'm going to do it!"
"Oh, my God! Renie, you can't do that for me if—You can't do that for me."
"He's got it, Izzy. I can get ten thousand out of him if I got to."
"But, Renie—"
"I—I can rush it through and—do it before two weeks, Izzy; and we got a way out, Izzy—we got a way. We got a way!"
She threw herself in a passion of hysteria face downward on the bed and a tornado of weeping swept over her. Rooted, he stood as though face to face with an immense dawn, but with eyes that dared not see the light.
"Renie, I—can't! I—Renie, I can't let you do that for me if—if—I can't let you marry him for me if you don't—"
"'Sh-h-h!"
Mrs. Shongut's voice outside the door, querulous: "Renie!"
Silence.
"Re-nie!"
"Yes, mamma."
"Why you got your door locked?"
Silence.
"Huh?"
"Come right away out in the dining-room. If you 'ain't got no more regards for your parents than not to stay home for supper, anyways you got to fix for the table the flowers what I brought home from market."
"Yes, mamma." She darted to her feet, drying the tears on her cheeks with the palm of her hand. "Coming, mamma." And she slipped through the door of her room, scarcely opening it.
In the dining-room, beside the white-spread table, Mrs. Shongut unwound a paper toot of pink carnations; but the flavor of her spirit was bitter and her thin, pressed-looking lips hung at the corners.
"Maybe you can stop pouting long enough to help with things a little, even if you won't be here. I tell you it's a pleasure when papa comes home for supper with company, to have children like mine."
"Listen, mamma. I—"
"Sounds like somebody's going out of the house, Renie. Who—"
"No, no. No one has been here, mamma. It's just the breeze."
"I tell you it's a pleasure to have a daughter like mine! What excuses to make to Max Hochenheimer, a young man what comes all the way from Cincinnati to see her—"
"Listen, mamma; I—I've only been fooling—honest, I have."
"What?"
"I—aw, mamma."
Miss Shongut's face was suddenly buried in the neat lace yoke of her mother's dimity blouse, and her arms crept up about her neck.
"I've been only fooling about to-night, mamma. Don't you think I know it is just like he was sent from heaven? I've only been fooling, mamma, so that—so that you shouldn't know how happy I am."
The soul peeped out suddenly in Mrs. Shongut's face, hallowing it."Renie! My little Renie!"
* * * * *
On Wasserman Avenue the hand that rocks the cradle oftener than not carves the roast. Behind her platter, sovereign of all she surveyed, and skilfully, so that beneath her steel the red, oozing slices curled and fell into their pool of gravy, reigned Mrs. Shongut. And her suzerainty rested on her as lightly as a tiara of seven stars.
"Mr. Hochenheimer, you ain't eating a thing!" Mrs. Shongut craned her neck round the centerpiece of pink carnations. "Not a thing on your plate! Renie, pass Mr. Hochenheimer some more salad."
"No, no, Mrs. Shongut; just don't you worry about me."
"I hope you ain't bashful, Mr. Hochenheimer. We feel toward you just like home folks."
"Indeed, what I don't see I ask for, Mrs. Shongut."
"Renie, pass Mr. Hochenheimer some more of that red cabbage."
"No, no—please, Mrs. Shongut; I got plenty."
"Ach, Mr. Hochenheimer, you eat so little you must be in love."
"Mamma!"
"Ach, Mr. Hochenheimer knows that I only fool. Renie, pass the dumplings."
"No, no—please! I—"
"Mamma, don't force. You're not bashful, are you, Mr. Hochenheimer?"
Miss Shongut inclined her head with a saucy, birdlike motion, and showed him the full gleaming line of her teeth. He took a large mouthful of ice-water to wash down the red of confusion that suddenly swam high in his face, tingeing even his ears.
"For more dumplings I ain't bashful, Miss Renie; but there—there's other things—I am bashful to ask for."
From his place at the far end of the table Mr. Shongut laughed deep, as though a spiral spring was vibrating in the recesses of his throat.
"Bashful with the girls—eh, Hochenheimer?"
"I ain't much of a lady's man, Shongut."
"Well, I wish you was just so bashful in business—believe me! I wish you was."
"Shongut, I never got the best of you yet in a deal."
"With my girl he's bashful yet, mamma; but down to the last sausage-casing I have to pay his fancy prices. Nun, look mamma, how red she gets! What you get so red for, Renie—eh?"
"Aw, papa!"
"A little teasing from her old father she can't take. Look at her, mamma! Look at both of them—red like beets. Neither of them can stand a little teasing from an old man."
"Adolph, you mustn't! All people don't like it when you make fun. Mr. Hochenheimer, you must excuse my husband; a great one he is to tease and make his little fun."
Mr. Shongut's ancient-looking face, covered with a short, grizzled growth of beard and pale as a prophet's beneath, broke into a smile, and a minute network of lines sprang out from the corners of his eyes.
"I was bashful in my life once, too—eh, mamma?"
"Papa!"
"Please, you must excuse my husband, Mr. Hochenheimer; he likes to have his little jokes."
Mr. Hochenheimer pushed away his plate in high embarrassment; nor would his eyes meet Miss Shongut's, except to flash away under cover of exaggerated imperturbability.
"My husband's a great one to tease, Mr. Hochenheimer. My Izzy too, takes after him. I'm sorry that boy ain't home, so you could meet him again. We call him the dude of the family. Renie, pass Mr. Hochenheimer the toothpicks."
A pair of deep-lined brackets sprang out round Mr. Shongut's mouth. "Why ain't that boy home for supper, where he belongs?"
"Ach, now, Adolph, don't get excited right away. Always, Mr. Hochenheimer, my husband gets excited over nothing, when he knows how it hurts his heart. Like that boy ain't old enough to stay out to supper when he wants, Adolph! 'Sh-h-h!"
Mrs. Shongut smiled to conceal that her heart was faint, and the saga of a mother might have been written round that smile.
"Now, now, Adolph, don't you begin to worry."
"I tell you, Shongut, it's a mistake to worry. I save all my excitement for the good things in life."
"See, Adolph; from a young man like Mr. Hochenheimer you can get pointers."
"I tell you, Shongut, over such a nice little home and such a nice little family as you got I might get excited; but over the little things that don't count for much I 'ain't got time."
Mrs. Shongut waved a deprecatory hand. "It's a nice enough little home for us, Mr. Hochenheimer, but with a grand house like I hear you built for your mother up on the stylish hilltop in Cincinnati, I guess to you it seems right plain."
"That's where you're wrong, Mrs. Shongut. Like I says to Shongut coming out on the street-car with him to-night, if it hadn't been that I thought maybe my mother would like a little fanciness after a hard life like hers, for my own part a little house and a big garden is all I ask for."
"Ach, Mr. Hochenheimer, with such a grand house like that is—sunk-in baths Mrs. Schwartz says you got! To see a house like that, I tell you it must be a treat."
"It's a fine place, Mrs. Shongut, but too big for me and my mother. When I got into the hands of architects, let me tell you, I feel I was lucky to get off with only twenty-five rooms. Right now, Mrs. Shongut, we got rooms we don't know how to pronounce."
"Twenty-five rooms! Did you hear that, Adolph? Twenty-five rooms! I bet, Mr. Hochenheimer, your mother is proud of such a son as can give her twenty-five rooms."
"We don't say much about it to each other, my mother and me; but—you can believe me or not—in our big, stylish house up there on the hill, with her servants to take away from her all the pleasure of work and her market and old friends down on Richmond Street yet, and nothing but gold furniture round her, she gets lonesome enough. If it wasn't for my garden and the beautiful scenery from my terraces, I would wish myself back in our little down-town house more than once, too. I tell you, Mrs. Shongut, fineness ain't everything."
"You should bring your mother some time to Mound City with you when you come over on business, Mr. Hochenheimer. We would do our best to make it pleasant for her."
"She's an old woman, Mrs. Shongut, and in a train or an automobile I can't get her. I guess it would be better, Mrs. Shongut, if I carry off some of your family with me to Cincinnati."
And, to belie that his words had any glittering import, he lay back in his chair in a state of silent laughter, which set his soft-fleshed cheeks aquiver; and his blue eyes, so ready yet so reluctant, disappeared behind a tight squint.
"Adolph, I guess Mr. Hochenheimer will excuse us—eh? Renie, you can entertain Mr. Hochenheimer while me and papa go and spend the evening over at Aunt Meena's. Mr. Shongut's sister, Mr. Hochenheimer, 'ain't been so well. Anyways, I always say young folks 'ain't got no time for old ones."
"You go right ahead along, Mrs. Shongut. Don't treat me like company. I hope Miss Renie don't mind if I spend the evening?"
"I should say not."
"Hochenheimer, a cigar?"
"Thanks; I don't smoke."
"My husband, with his heart trouble, shouldn't smoke, neither, Mr. Hochenheimer; it worries me enough. What me and the doctors tell him goes in one ear and out of the other."
"See, Hochenheimer, when you get a wife how henpecked you get!"
"A henpeck never drew much blood, Shongut."
"Come, Adolph; it is a long car-ride to Meena's."
They pushed back from the table, the four of them, smiling-lipped. With his short-fingered, hairy-backed hands Mr. Hochenheimer dusted at his coat lapels, then shook his bulging trousers knees into place.
The lamp of inner sanctity burns in strange temples. A carpenter in haircloth shirt first turned men's hearts outward. Who can know, who does not first cross the plain of the guide with gold, that behind the moldy panels at Ara Coeli reigns the jeweled bambino, robed in the glittering gems of sacrifice?
Who could know, as Mr. Hochenheimer stood there in the curtailed dignity of his five feet five, that behind his speckled and slightly rotund waistcoat a choir sang of love, and that the white flame of his spirit burned high?
"I tell you, Mrs. Shongut, it is a pleasure to be invited out to your house. You should know how this old bachelor hates hotels."
"And you should know how welcome you always are, Mr. Hochenheimer.To-morrow night you take supper with us too. We don't take 'no'—eh,Adolph? Renie?"
"I appreciate that, Mrs. Shongut; but I—I don't know yet—if—if I stay over."
Mr. Shongut batted a playful hand and shuffled toward the door. "You stay, Hochenheimer! I bet you a good cigar you stay. Ain't I right, Renie, that he stays? Ain't I right?"
Against the sideboard, fingering her white dress, Miss Shongut regarded her parents, and her smile was as wan as moonlight.
"Ain't I right, Renie?"
"Yes, papa."
* * * * *
On the bit of porch, the hall light carefully lowered and cushions from within spread at their feet, the dreamy quiet of evening and air as soft as milk flowed round and closed in about Miss Shongut and Mr. Hochenheimer.
They drew their rocking-chairs arm to arm, so that, behind a bit of climbing moonflower vine, they were as snug as in a bower. Stars shone over the roofs of the houses opposite; the shouts of children had died down; crickets whirred.
"Is the light from that street lamp in your eyes, Renie?"
"No, no."
The wooden floor reverberated as they rocked. A little thrill of breeze fluttered her filmy shoulder scarf against his hand. To his fermenting fancy it was as though her spirit had flitted out of the flesh.
"Ah, Miss Renie, I—I—"
"What, Mr. Hochenheimer?"
"Nothing. Your—your little shawl, it tickled my hand so."
She leaned her elbow on the arm of her chair and cupped her chin in her palm. Her eyes had a peculiar value—like a mill-pond, when the wheel is still, reflects the stars in calm and unchurned quiet.
"You look just like a little princess to-night, Miss Renie—that pretty shawl and your eyes so bright."
"A princess!"
"Yes; if I had a tin suit and a sword to match I'd ride up on a horse and carry you off to my castle in Cincinnati."
"Say, wouldn't it be a treat for Wasserman Avenue to see me go loping off like that!"
"This is the first little visit we've ever had together all by ourselves, ain't it, Miss Renie? Seems like, to a bashful fellow like me, you was always slipping away from me."
"The flowers and the candies you kept sending me were grand, Mr.Hochenheimer—and the letter—to-day."
"You read the letter, Miss Renie?"
"Yes, I—I—You shouldn't keep spoiling me with such grand flowers and candy, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"If tell you that never in my life I sent flowers or candy, or wrote a letter like I wrote you yesterday, to another young lady, I guess you laugh at me—not, Miss Renie?"
"You shouldn't begin, Mr. Hochenheimer, by spoiling me."
"Ah, Miss Renie, if you knew how I like to spoil you, if you would let me—Ach, what's the use? I—I can't say it like I want." She could hear him breathing. "It—it's a grand night, Miss Renie."
"Yes."
"Grand!"
"And look over those roofs! It seems like there's a million stars shining, don't it?"
"You're like me, Miss Renie; so many times I've noticed it. Nothing is so grand to me as nature, neither."
"Up at Green Springs, in the Ozarks, where we went for ten days last summer, honest, Mr. Hochenheimer, I used to lie looking out the window all night. The stars up there shone so close it seemed like you could nearly touch them."
"Ain't that wonderful, Miss Renie, you should be just like me again!" She smiled in the dark. "When I was a boy always next to the attic window I liked to sleep. When I built my house, Miss Renie, the first thing after I designed my rose-garden I drew up for myself a sleeping-garden on my roof. The architects fussed enough about spoiling the roof-line, but that's one of the things I wanted which I stood pat for and got—my sleeping-garden."
"Sleeping-garden!"
"Miss Renie, I just wish you could see it—all laid out in roses in summer, and a screened-in pergola, where I sleep, right underneath the stars and roses. I sleep so close to heaven I always say I can smell it."
She turned her little face, white as a spray of jasmine against a dark background of night, toward him. "Underneath a pergola of roses! I guess it's the roses you must smell. How grand!"
"Sometimes when—if you come to Cincinnati I want to show you my place, Miss Renie. If I say so myself, I got a wonderful garden; flowers I can show you grown from clippings from every part of the world. If I do say so, for a sausage-maker who never went to school two years in his life it ain't so bad. I got a lily-pond, Miss Renie, they come from all over to see. By myself I designed it."
"It must be grand, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"On Sunday, Miss Renie, I like for my boys and girls from the factory to come up to my place and make themselves at home. You should see my old mother how she fixes for them! I wish you could see them boys and girls, and old men and women. In a sausage-factory they don't get much time to listen to birds and water when it falls into a fountain. I wish, Miss Renie, you could see them with the flowers. I—well, I don't know how to say it; but I wish you could see them for yourself."
"They like it?"
"Like it! I tell you it's the greatest pleasure I get out of my place. I wish, instead of my fine house, the city would let me build my factory for them right in the garden."
"On such a stylish street they wouldn't ever let you, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"Me and my mother ain't much for style, Miss Renie. Honest, you'd be surprised, but with my fine house I don't even keep an automobile. My mother, she's old, Miss Renie, and won't go in one. Alone it ain't no pleasure; and when I don't walk down to my factory the street-cars is good enough."
"You should take it easier, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"All our lives, Miss Renie, we've been so busy, my mother and me, I tell her we got to be learnt—like children got to be learnt to walk—how to enjoy ourselves. We—we need somebody young—somebody like you in the house, Miss Renie—young and so pretty, and full of life, and—and so sweet."
She gave a gauzy laugh. "Honest, it must seem like a dream to have a rose-garden right on the place you live."
"I wish you could see, Miss Renie, a new Killarney my gardener showed me in the hothouse yesterday before I left—white-and-pink blend; he got the clipping from Jamaica. It's a pale pink in the heart like the first minute when the sun rises; and then it gets pinker and pinker toward the outside petals, till it just bursts out as red as the sun when it's ready to set."
"And those beautiful little tan roses you sent me, Mr. Hochenheimer;I—"
"Ah, Miss Renie, the clipping from those sunset roses comes from Italy; but now I call them Renie Roses, if—if you'll excuse me. I tell you, Miss Renie, you look just enough like 'em to be related. Little satiny gold-looking roses, with a pink blush on the inside of the petals and a—a few little soft thorns on the stem."
"Aw, Mr. Hochenheimer, I ain't got thorns."
Out from the velvet shadows his face came closer. "It's thorns to me, Miss Renie, because you're so pretty and sweet, and—and seem so far away from a—plain fellow like me."
"I'm a plain man, Miss Renie, and I don't know how to talk much about the things I feel inside of me; but—but Ifeel, all-righty."
"Looks ain't everything."
"I tell you, Miss Renie, now since I can afford it, I just don't seem to know how to do the things I got the feeling inside of me for. Even in my grand house sometimes I feel like it—it's too late for me to live like I feel."
"Nothing's ever too late, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"Just since I met you I can feel that way, Miss Renie, if you'll excuse me for saying it—just since I met you."
"Me?"
"For the first time in my life, Miss Renie, I got the feeling from a girl that, for me, life—maybe my life—is just beginning. Like a vine, Miss Renie, you got yourself tangled round my feelings."
"Oh, Mr. Hochenheimer!"
"Like I told your papa to-night on the car, I 'ain't got much to offer a beautiful young girl like you; money, I can see, don't count for so much with a fine girl like you, and I—I don't need to be told that my face and my ways ain't my fortune."
"It's the heart that counts, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"If—if you mean that, Miss Renie—if love, just love, can bring happiness, I can make for you a life as beautiful as my rose-garden. For the first time in my life, Miss Renie, I got the feeling I can do that for a woman—and that woman is you. I—Will you—will you be my wife, Miss Renie?" She could feel his breath now, scorching her cheek. "Will you, Miss Renie?"
And even as she leaned over to open her lips a figure, swift as a Greek, dashed to the veranda—up the steps three at a bound.
"Renie!"
"Izzy!" She rose, pushing back her chair, and her hand flew to her breast.
"Just a minute. Inside I gotta see you quick, Renie. Howdy,Hochenheimer? You excuse her a minute. I got to see her."
His voice was like wine that sings in the pouring.
"Yes, yes, Izzy; I'm coming." Hers was trembling and pizzicato. "Excuse me a minute, Mr. Hochenheimer—a minute."
Mr. Hochenheimer rose, mopping his brow. "It's all right, Miss Renie. I wait out here on the porch till it pleases you."
In her tiny bedroom, with the light turned up, she faced her brother; and he grasped her shoulders so that, through the sheer texture of her dress, his hands left red prints on the flesh.
"Renie, you 'ain't done it, have you?"
"No, no, Izzy; I've done nothing. Where you been?"
He gave a great laugh and sank into a chair, limp. "You don't have to,Renie. It's all right! I've fixed it. Everything is all right!"
"What do you mean?"
Then, as though the current of his returning vigor could know no bounds, he scooped her in a one-armed embrace that fairly raised her from the floor.
"All of a sudden, when you went out, Renie, I remembered Aunt Becky. You remember she was the one who made Uncle Isadore fork over to papa that time about the mortgage?"
"Yes, yes."
"All of a sudden it came over me that she was the only one who could do anything with him. I ran over to the house—all the way I ran, Renie. She was up in her room, and—and it's all right, Renie. I told her, and she's fixed it—fixed it!"
"Oh, Izzy!"
"She's fixed it. When he came home to supper we got him right away up in her room before he had his hat off. Like a mother she begged for me, Renie—like a mother. God! I—I tell you I couldn't go through it again; but she got him, Renie—she got him!"
"Go on, Izzy—go on!"
"She told him I wouldn't face the shame; she told him I—I'd kill my own father, and that the blood would be on his hands; she told him if he'd let me go to the devil without another chance—me that had been named after him—that a curse would roost on his chest. He didn't want to give in to her—he didn't want to; but she scared him, and she's a woman and she knew how to get inside of him—she knew how. They're going to send me out to his mines, where I can start over, Renie. Out West, where it'll make a new man of me; where I can begin over—start right, Renie. Start right!"
"Oh, Izzy darling!"
"I can pay up when I earn the money like a man, Renie. It would have killed me if you had sold yourself to him for me. I'd have gone to the stripes first. But I got a man's chance now, Renie, and I don't have to do that rotten thing to you and Squash. A man's chance, Renie, and—and I'm going to take it."
She sat down on the bed suddenly, as though the blood had flowed out of her heart, weakening her.
"A sister like you that would have stuck; and—and I'm going to make good to a sister like you, Renie. I am, this time. Please believe me, Renie. I am! I am!"
Her hand lay pressed to his cheek and she could feel the warm course of his tears. "Izzy, I knew you wasn't yellow; I—I knew you wasn't."
Sobs shook him suddenly and he buried his face in the pillow beside her.
"Why, Izzy! Why, Izzy darling, what—what is it, Izzy darling?"
"It's nothing. You—you get out, Renie. I'm all right; only—only it's—it's—Now that it's all over, I—I—Just let me alone a minute, Renie. Go—you—please—please!"
She closed the door behind her and fumbled through the gloom of the hallway, her hand faltering as she groped ahead.
From the recesses of the moonflower vine Mr. Hochenheimer rose to meet her; and, because her limbs would tremble, she slid quickly into her chair.
"You—you must excuse me, Mr. Hochenheimer."
"It's all right, Miss Renie. I take up where we left off. It ain't so easy, Miss Renie, to begin all over again to say it, but—but will you be my—will you be my—"
She was suddenly in his arms, burrowing against the speckled waistcoat a little resting-place for her head.
Toward the city Mother Earth turns a plate-glass eye and an asphalt bosom. The rhythm of her heart-beats does not penetrate through paved streets. That cadence is for those few of her billion children who have stayed by to sleep with an ear to the mossy floor of her woodlands. The prodigals, the future Tammany leaders, merchant princes, cotton kings, and society queens march on, each to an urban destiny.
Nor is the return of the prodigal to Mother Earth along a piked highway. The road back to Nature is full of her own secrets, and few who have trod the streets of the city remember the brambled return, or care.
Men who know to the centime each fluctuation of the wheat-market have no eye for the tawny beauty of a whole field of the precious product fluctuating to a breeze. Women stayed by steel and convention into the mold of form love the soft faces of flowers looking up at them from expensive corsages, but care not for their nativity. Greeks, first of men, perched their gods up on Olympus and wandered down to build cities.
Because the city is as insidious as the sleeping-draught of an Indian soothsayer, under its spell men go mad for gain and forget that to stand on the brow of a mountain at night, arms outstretched in kinship to Vega and Capella, is a golden moment of purer alloy than certified bonds. What magnate remembers where the best tackle squirms, or the taste of grass sucked in from the tender end of the blade? All progress is like that. How immediately are the yesterdays metamorphosed into memories; and memories, even the stanchest of them, mold and disintegrate.
There were times when Mrs. Simon Meyerburg, who was threescore and ten years removed from the days when her bare feet had run fleet across a plushy meadow, would pause, hand on brow, when a memory, perhaps moving as it crumpled, would pass before her in faded daguerreotype. A gallery of events—so many pictures faded from her mental walls that the gaps seemed, as it were, to separate her from herself, making of her and that swift-footed girl back there vague strangers. And yet the vivid canvases! A peasant child at a churn, switching her black braids this way and that when they dangled too far over her shoulders; a linnet dead in its cage outside a thatched doorway, and the taste of her first heart tears; a hand-made crib in a dark corner and hardly ever empty of a little new-comer.
Then gaps, except here and there a faded bit. Then again large memories close and full of color: Simon Meyerburg, with the years folded back and youth on him, wooing her beside a stile that led off a South German country road, his peasant cap fallen back off his strong black curls, and even then a seer's light in his strong black eyes. Her own black eyes more diffident now and the black braids looped up and bound in a tight coronet round her head. The voice of the mother calling her homeward through cupped hands and in the Low Dutch of the Lowlands. A moonrise and the sweet, vivid smell of evening, and once more the youth Simon Meyerburg wooing her there beside the roadside stile.
The crowded steerage of a wooden ship, her first son suckling at her breast. At the prow Simon Meyerburg again, his peasant cap pushed backward and his black eyes, with the seer's light in them, gleaming ahead for the first glimpse of the land of fulfilment. An unbelievable city sucking them immediately into its slums. Filth. A quick descent into squalor. A second son. A third. A fourth. A fifth. A girl child. Mouths too eager for black bread. Always the struggle and the sour smell of slums. Finally light. White light. The seer sees!
Then, ever green in her mind, a sun-mottled kitchen with a black iron range, and along the walls festoons of looped-up green peppers. White bread now in abundance for small mouths not so hungry. At evening, Simon Meyerburg, with rims of dirt under his nails, entering that kitchen door, the girl child turning from her breast to leap forward….
Sometimes in her stately halls, caught, as it were, in passing from room to room, Mrs. Simon Meyerburg would pause, assaulted by these memories of days so remote that her mind could not always run back to meet them. Then again the glittering present studded with the jewels of fulfilment lay on her brow like the thin line of a headache, pressing out the past.
In Mrs. Meyerburg's bedroom a great arched ceiling, after the narrative manner of Paolo Veronese, lent such vastness to the apartment that moving across it, or sitting in her great overstuffed armchair beside a window, she hardly struck a note. Great wealth lay in canopied silence over that room. A rug out of Persia, so large that countless extra years and countless pairs of tired eyes and tired fingers had gone to make it, let noises sink noiseless into its nap. Brocade and tufting ate up sound. At every window more brocade shut out the incessant song of the Avenue.
In the overstuffed chair beside one of these windows sat Mrs. Meyerburg with her hands idle and laid out along the chair sides. They were ringless hands and full of years, with a great network of veins across their backs and the aging fingers large at the knuckles. But where the hands betrayed the eyes belied. Deep in Mrs. Meyerburg's soft and scarcely flabby face her gaze was straight and very black.
An hour by an inlaid ormolu clock she sat there, her feet in soft, elastic-sided shoes, just lifted from the floor. Incongruous enough, on a plain deal table beside her, a sheaf of blue-prints lay unrolled. She fingered them occasionally and with a tenderness, as if they might be sensitive to touch; even smiled and held the sheets one by one up against the shrouded window so that the light pressing through them might emphasize the labyrinth of lines. Dozed, with a smile printed on her lips, and awoke when her head lopped too heavily sidewise.
After an interval she slid out of her chair and crossed to the door; even in action her broad, squat figure infinitesimal to the room's proportions. When she opened the door the dignity of great halls lay in waiting. She crossed the wide vista to a closed door, a replica of her own, and knocked, waited, turned the crystal knob, knocked, waited. Rapped again, this time in three staccatos. Silence. Then softly and with her cheek laid against the imperturbable panel of the closed door:
"Becky! Becky! Open! Open!"
A muffled sound from within as if a sob had been let slip.
Then again, rattling the knob this time: "Becky, it's mamma. Becky, you should get up now; it's time for our drive. Let me in, Becky. Open!" shaking the handle.
When the door opened finally, Mrs. Meyerburg stepped quickly through the slit, as if to ward off its too heavy closing. A French maid, in the immemorial paraphernalia of French maids, stood by like a slim sentinel on stilts, her tall, small heels clicked together. Perfume lay on the artificial dusk of that room.
"Therese, you can go down awhile. When Miss Becky wants she can ring."
"Oui, madame."
"I wish, Therese, when you go down you would tell Anna I don't want she should put the real lace table-cloth from Miss Becky's party last night in the linen-room. Twice I've told her after its use she should always bring it right back to me."
"Oui, madame." And Therese flashed out on the slim heels.
In the crowded apartment, furnished after the most exuberant of the various exuberant French periods, Miss Rebecca Meyerburg lay on a Louis Seize bed, certified to have been lifted, down to the casters, from the Grand Trianon of Marie Antoinette. In a great confusion of laces and linens, disarrayed as if tossed by a fever patient, she lay there, her round young arm flung up over her head and her face turned downward to the curve of one elbow.
"Ach, now, Becky, ain't it a shame you should take on so? Ain't it a shame before the servants? Come, baby, in a half-hour it's time for our drive. Come, baby!"
Beneath the fine linen Miss Meyerburg dug with her toes into the mattress, her head burrowing deeper and the black mane of her hair rippling backward in maenadic waves. "If you don't let me alone, ma, if you don't just let me lay here in peace, I'll scream. I'll faint. Faint, I tell you," and smothered her words in the curve of her elbow.
Mrs. Meyerburg breathed outward in a sigh and sat down hesitant on the bed edge, her hand reaching out to the bare white shoulder and smoothing its high luster.
"Come, Becky, and get up like a good girl. Don't you want, baby, to come over by mamma's room and see the plans for the Memorial?"
"No! No! No!"
"They got to be sent back to-day, Becky, before Goldfinger leaves for Boston with them. I got to get right away busy if I want the boys should have their surprise this time next year. To no one but my baby girl have I said yet one word. Don't you want, Becky, to see them before they go down by Goldfinger's office, so he can right away go ahead?"
"No! No!"
"Becky, ain't you ashamed, your own papa's Memorial?"
"Please, mamma, please. If you only won't Becky me."
"Betty."
"If you only will go and—and leave me alone."
"I ask you, Betty, should a girl what's got everything that should make her happy just like an angel, a girl what has got for herself heaven on earth, make herself right away sick the first time what things don't go smooth with her?"
"If I could only die! If I could die! Why don't I die to-day?"
The throb of a sob lay on her voice, and she sat up suddenly, pushing backward with both hands the thick rush of hair to her face. Grief had blotched her cheeks, but she was as warm and as curving as Flora. It was as if her deep-white flesh was deep-white plush and would sink to the touch. The line and the sheen of her radiated through her fine garment.
"Why don't I die?" repeating her vain question, and her eyes, darker because she was so white, looking out and past her parent and streaming their bitter tears.
"You'm a bad girl, Becky, and it's a sin you should talk so.Gott sei dankyour poor papa ain't alive to hear such bad words from his own daughter's lips."
"If pa was living things would be different—let me tell you that."
In a flare of immediate anger Mrs. Meyerburg's head shot forward. "Du—" she cried; "du—you—you bad girl—du—"
"If he had lived they would!"
Suddenly Mrs. Meyerburg's face, with the lines in it held tight, relaxed to tears and she fell to rocking herself softly to and fro, her stiff silk shushing as she swayed.
"Ach, that I should live to hear from my own child that I 'ain't done by her like her father would want that I should do. Every hour since I been left alone, to do by my six children like he would want has been always my only thought, and now—"
"I mean it! I mean it! If he had lived he would have settled it on me easy enough when he saw what I was doing for the family. Two million if need be! He was the one in this family that made it big, because he wasn't afraid of big things."
Further rage trembled along Mrs. Meyerburg's voice, and the fingers she waggled trembled, too, of that same wrath. "You'm a bad girl, Becky! You'm a bad girl with thought only for yourself. Always your papa said by each child we should do the same. Five hundred thousand dollars to each son when he marries a fine, good girl. More as one night I can tell you I laid awake when Felix picked out for himself Trixie, just wondering what papa would want I should do it or not."
"Can't you keep from picking on that girl, mamma? It's through her, if you want to know it, that I first got in with—with the marquis and that crowd."
"Always by each child we should do the same, he said. Five hundred thousand dollars to our girl when she marries a fine, good man. Even back in days when he had not a cent to leave after him, always he said alike you should all be treated. Always, you hear? Always."
Fire had dried the tears in Mrs. Meyerburg's eyes and her face had resumed its fixity of lines. Only her finger continued to tremble and two near-the-surface nerves in her left temple.
"But, mamma, you know yourself he never dreamt we could climb up to this. That for a miserable five hundred thousand more we—"
"A miserable five hundred thousand she calls it like it was five hundred thousand cents!"
"That for a miserable five hundred thousand dollars we could raise our family up to the nobility. The Marquis Rosencrantz, ma, who—"
"Becky, it ain't that I got a word to say against this young manRosencrantz—but—"
"Marquis Rosencrantz, mamma."
"All right then, Marquis Rosencrantz; but it's like your brother Ben says—a marquis in a country where there ain't no more any of them made could just as well be called a mister. Not a word I got to say against this young Rosencrantz, but—"
"Marquis, ma, please remember! M-a-r-q-u-i-s. Whether there are any more of them or not in France, he still goes by the title over here, and that's what he is, ma. Please remember!"
"Marquis Rosencrantz. But when a young man, Becky, don't talk my own language, it ain't so easy for me to know if I like him—"
"Like him. Huh!" Sitting there upright in bed, her large, white arms wrapped about her knees, Miss Meyerburg regarded her mother with dry eyes, but through a blur of scorn. "She don't know if she likes him! Let me tell you, ma, we can worry if he likes us, not if we like him."
"I always say, Becky, about these fine people what you meet traveling inEurope with your brother Felix and his wife with her gay ways, you—"
"A marquis comes her way and she don't know whether she likes him or not. That's rich!"
"For the price what you say he hinted to you last night he's got to have before he can get married, I guessoserI can say if I like him or not."
"I should think, ma, if you had any pride for the family after the way we've been spit on by a certain bunch in this town, you'd be glad to grab a marquis to wave in their stuck-up faces."
"For such things what make in life men like wild beasts fighting each other I got no time. I ain't all for style. All what I want is to see my little girl married to a fine, good—"
"Yes, yes, ma. I know all that fine, good man stuff."
"Ja, I say it again. To a fine, good man just like nearly all your brothers married fine, good women."
"The marquis, just let me tell you, ma, is a man of force—he is. Maybe those foreigners don't always show up, but I've seen him on his own ground. I've seen him in Paris and Monte Carlo and I—"
"I 'ain't got a word to say against this young man what followed you all the way home from Paris. What I don't know I can't talk about. Only I ask you, Becky, ain't it always in the papers how from Europe they run here thick after the girls what have got money?"
"What are you always running down Europe for, ma? Where did you come from, yourself, I'd like to know!"
"I don't run it down, baby. I don't. You know how your papa loved the old country and sent always money back home. But he always said, baby, it's in America we had all our good luck and to America what gave us so much we should give back too. Just because your brother Felix and his wife what was on the stage like such doings over there is no reason—"
"It's just those notions of yours, ma, that are keeping this family down, let me tell you that—you and Ben and Roody and Izzy and all the rest of them with their old-fogyness."
"Your brothers, let me tell you, you bad girl, you, are as fine, steady men as your papa before them."
"We could have one of the biggest names in this town and get in on the right kind of charities, if you and they didn't—"
"Your papa, Becky, had his own ideas how to do charity and how we should not give just where our name shows big in the papers. Your brothers are like him, fine, good men, and that's why I want the Memorial should come like a surprise, so they can have before them always that their father was the finest—"
Suddenly Miss Meyerburg flung herself back on her pillows, tears gushing hot and full of salt. "Oh, what's the use? What's the use? She won't understand."
"Becky, baby, 'ain't you got everything what money can buy? A house on Fifth Avenue what even the sight-seeing automobile hollers out about. Automobiles of your own more as you can use. Brothers nearly all with grand wives and families, and such a beautiful girl like you with a grand fortune to—"
"Mamma, mamma, can't you understand there's things that money can't buy?"
"Ja, I should say so; but them is the things, Becky, that money makes you forget all about."
"Try to understand, can't you, ma, that the Rosencrantzes are a great old French family. You know for yourself how few of—of our people got titles to their names. Jacob Rosencrantz, ma, the marquis's great-grandfather back in the days when the family had big money, got his title from the king, ma, for lending money when the—"
"If all of his sons got, like this great-grandson of his asks, one million dollars with their wives, I should say he could afford to lend to the king. To two kings!"
"Please, mamma, can't you understand? It don't hurt how things are now—it's the way they used to be with those kinds of families that count, ma. I was on their estate in France, ma, with Trixie and Felix. She used to know him in Paris when she was singing there. You ought to see, ma, an old, old place that you can ride on for a day and not come to the end, and the house so moldy and ramshackly that any American girl would be proud to marry into it. Those are the things, ma, that our family needs and money can't buy."
"You mean, Becky, that five hundred thousand dollars can't buy it! It has got to be a million dollars yet! A million dollars my child asks for just like it was five dollars!"
"I'm not asking that, ma, I'm not. Five hundred thousand of it is mine by rights. I'm only asking for half a million."
"Gott in Himmel, child, much more as a million dollars I 'ain't got left altogether. With my five sons married and their shares drawn, I tell you, Becky, a million dollars to you now would leave me so low that—"
"There you go. That's what you said that time Felix had to have the hundred thousand in a hurry, but I notice you got it overnight without even turning a finger. For him you can do, but—"
"For a black sheep I got to—"
"It's not all tease with the boys, let me tell you, ma, when they sing that song at you about a whole stocking full you've got that none of us know anything about."
"Ja, you and your brothers can talk, but I know what's what. Don't think, Becky, your brother Felix and his wife with their Monte Carlo all the time and a yacht they got to have yet, and their debts, 'ain't eat a piece out of the fortune your papa built up for you children out of his own sweat."
"Don't go back to ancient history, ma."
"Those cut-uppings is for billionaires, Becky; not for one old lady as 'ain't got much more as a million left after her six dowries is paid."
"Yes, I wish I had what you've got over and above that."
"That young Rosencrantz is playing you high, Becky, because he sees how high your brother and his wife can fly. Always when people get big like us, right away the world takes us for even bigger as we are. He 'ain't got no right to make such demands. Five hundred thousand dollars is more as he ever saw in his life. I tell you, Becky, if I could speak to that young man like you can in his own language, I would tell him what—"
"He don't make demands in so many words, ma. There—there's a way those things are done without just coming right out. I guess you think, when Selma Bernheimer married her baron, he came right out in words and said it had to be two millions. Like fun he did! But just the same, you don't think she could have said yes to him, when he asked her, unless she knew that she—she could fork over, do you?"
"I tell you in such marriages the last thing what you hear talked about is being in love."
"Oh, that had nothing to do with this, ma. The love part is there all right. You—you don't understand, ma!"
"Gott sei dankthat I don't understand such!"
Then Miss Meyerburg leaned forward, her large, white hand on her parent's knee, her face close and full of fervor. "Ma dear, you got it in your power sitting there to make me the happiest girl in the world. I'll do more for the family in this marriage, ma dear, than all five of the boys put together. I tell you, ma, it's the biggest minute in the life of this family if you give—if you do this for me, ma. It is, dear."
"Ja, let me just tell you that your brothers and their wives will be the first to put their foot down on that the youngest should get twice as much as they."
"What do you care? And, anyways, ma, they don't need to know. What they don't know don't hurt them. Don't tell them, ma; just don't tell them. Ain't I the only girl, and the baby too? Haven't I got the chance to, raise them all up in society? Oh, ma dear, you've got so much! So much more than you can ever use, and—and you—you're old now, ma, and I—I'm so young, dear, so young!"
"Ja, like you say, maybe I'm old, but I tell you, Becky, I 'ain't got the money to throw away like—"
"Let me let the marquis ask me when he comes to-night, ma. He's ready to pop if—if I just dare to let him, ma."
"Gott in Himmel, I tell you how things is done now'days between young people. I should let him ask her yet, she says, like I had put on his mouth a muzzle."
"It's no use letting him ask me, ma dear, if I can't come across like I know the girl he can marry has got to. Let me let him ask me to-night, ma. And to-morrow at New-Year's dinner with all the family here, we'll break it to 'em, ma. Mamma dearie! Let me ask the marquis here to New-Year's dinner to-morrow to meet his new brothers. Ma dearie!"
She was frankly pleading, her eyes twilit, with stars shining through, her mouth so like red fruit and her beautiful brows raised.
"So help me, Becky, if I give you the million like you ask and with theMemorial yet to build, I am wiped out, Becky. Wiped out!"
"Wiped out! With five sons with their finger in every good pie in town and a daughter married into nobility?"
"I 'ain't got one word to say against my children, Becky; luckier I been as most mothers; but the day what I am dependent on one of them for my living, that day I want I should be done with living."
"You could live with us, ma dearie. Paris in season and the estate in winter. You—you could run the big estate for us, ma, order and—"
"You heard what I said, Becky."
"Well, then, ma, why—why don't you get the Memorial out of your head, dear? Pa built his own Memorial, ma. His memory lasts with everybody, anyway."
Aspen trembling laid hold of Mrs. Meyerburg, muddling her words. "You—ach—from her dead father yet she would take away the marble to his memory."
"Ma!"
"Ja, the marble to his memory! Bad girl, you! A man what lifted up with his hands those that came after so that hardly on the ground they got to put a foot. And now du—du what gives him no thanks! A Memorial to her papa, a Home for the Old and Poor what he always dreamed of building, she begrudges, she begrudges!"
"No, no, mamma, you don't understand!"
"A man what loved so the poor while he lived, shouldn't be able to do for the poor after he is dead too. You go, you bad girl you, to your grand nobleman what won't take you if you ain't worth every inch your weight in gold, you—"
"Mamma—mamma, if you don't stop your terrible talk I—I'll faint, I tell you!"
"You go and your brother Felix and his fine wife with you, for the things what money can buy. You got such madness for money, sometimes like wolfs you all feel to me breathing on my back, you go and—"
"I tell you if—if you don't stop that terrible talk I—I'll faint, I will! Oh, why don't I die—why—why—why?"
"Since the day what he died every hour I've lived for the time when, with my children provided for, I could spend the rest of my days building to a man what deserved it such a monument as he should have. A Home for the Old and Poor with a park all around, where they can sit all day in the sun. All ready I got the plans in my room to send them down by Goldfinger this afternoon he should go right ahead and—"
"Mamma, mamma, please listen—"
But the voice of Mrs. Meyerburg rose like a gale and her face was slashed with tears. "If my last cent it takes and on the streets I go to beg, up such a Memorial goes. All you children with your feet up on his shoulders can turn away from his memory now he's gone, but up it goes if on the day what I die I got to dig dirt with my finger-nails to pay yet for my coffin."
"Listen, ma; just be calm a minute—just a minute. I don't mean that.Didn't I just say he was the grandest father in the world and—"
"You said—"
"'Sh-h-h, mamma! Quiet, quiet! There isn't one of the boys wouldn't agree with me if they knew. We aren't big enough, I tell you, to sink a million in an out-of-town charity like that. In any charity, for that matter, no matter how big it shows up. You say yourself a million and a half will cripple you. Well, your first duty is to us living and not to him dead—To us living! It means my whole life, my whole life!" And she beat the pillow with hard fists.
"Ja, but—"
"With that money you can buy my happiness living, and he don't want it or need it dead."
Within the quick vise of her two hands Mrs. Meyerburg clasped her face, all quivering and racked with sobs. "I can't hear it. It's like she was sticking knifes into me."
"The marquis has the kind of blood we need to give this family a boost. We can be big, ma. Big, I tell you. I can have a crest embroidered in two colors in my linens. That inside clique that looks down on us now can do some looking up then. The boys don't need to know about that million, ma. Just let me have the marquis here to-morrow to meet his new brothers, ma, like there was nothing unusual. I'll pay it back to you in a million ways. The Memorial will come in time. Everything will come in time. Make me the happiest girl in the world, ma. He'll ask me to-night if I let him. Get the Memorial plans out of your head for a while, anyway! Just for a while!"
"Not so long as I got in me the strength to send down them plans to Goldfinger's office this afternoon with my message to go ahead. I don't invite no marquis here to-morrow for family dinner if I got to get him here with a million dollars' worth of bait. I—"
"Mamma!"
"Go and tell him your stingy old mamma would rather build a Home for the Old and Poor in memory of the grandest man what ever lived than give a snip like him, what never did a lick of work in his life, a fortune so he should have with it a good time at Monte Carlo. Just go tell him! Tell him!"
She was trembling now so that she could scarcely withdraw from the bedside, but her voice had lost none of its gale-like quality.
"Go tell him! Maybe it does him good he should hear." And in spite of her ague she crossed the vast room, slamming the door so that a great shudder ran over the room.
On the bed that had been lifted bodily from the Grand Trianon of MarieAntoinette, its laces upheaved about her like billows in anger, RebeccaMeyerburg lay with her face to the ceiling, raw sobs distorting it.
Steadying herself without that door, her hand laid between her breasts and slightly to the left, as if there a sharp pain had cut her, Mrs. Meyerburg leaned to the wall a moment, and, gaining quick composure, proceeded steadily enough across the wide aisle of hall, her hand following a balustrade.
A servant intercepted her half-way. "Madam—"
"Kemp, from here when I look down in the lower hall, all them ferns look yellow on top. I want you should please cut them!"
"Yes, madam. Mrs. Fischlowitz, madam, has been waiting down in the side hall for you."
"Mrs. Fischlowitz! For why you keep her waiting in the side hall?"
"Therese said madam was occupied."
"Bring her right up, Kemp, in the elevator. Her foot ain't so good.Right away, Kemp."
"Yes, madam."
Into Mrs. Meyerburg's room of many periods, its vastness so emphasized by the ceiling after Paolo Veronese, its fluted yellow-silk bed canopy reaching up to that ceiling stately and theatric enough to shade the sleep of a shah, limped Mrs. Fischlowitz timidly and with the uncertainty with which the callous feet of the unsocialistic poor tread velvet.
"How-do, Mrs. Fischlowitz?"
"Mrs. Meyerburg, I didn't want you to be disturbed except I want to explain to you why I'm late again this month."
"Sit down! I don't want you should even explain, Mrs.Fischlowitz—that's how little I thought about it."
Mrs. Meyerburg was full of small, pleased ways, drawing off her guest's decent black cape, pulling at her five-fingered mittens, lifting the nest-like bonnet.
"So! And how's the foot?"
"Not so good and not so bad. And how is the sciatica with you, Mrs.Meyerburg?"
"Like with you, Mrs. Fischlowitz. It could be better and it could be worse. Sometimes I got a little touch yet up between my ribs."
"If it ain't one thing, Mrs. Meyerburg, it's another. What you think why I'm late again with the rent, Mrs. Meyerburg? If last week my Sollie didn't fall off the delivery-wagon and sprain his back!"
"You don't say so!"
"That same job as you got him two years ago so good he's kept, and now such a thing has to happen.Gott sei dank, he's up and out again, but I tell you it was a scare!"
"I should say so. And how is Tillie?"
"Mrs. Meyerburg, you should just see for yourself how that girl has got new color since that certified milk you send her every day. Like a new girl so pretty all of a sudden she has grown. For to-morrow, Mrs. Meyerburg, a girl what never before had a beau in her life, if Morris Rinabauer, the young foreman where she works, 'ain't invited her out for New-Year's Day."