Chapter VII: Part 7

Her mouth still resolute not to loosen, she jerked back from him. There was only the high flush which she could not control, and the gaze, heavy lidded, was not so sure as it might have been. She was quietly, rather pleasantly, dizzy.

"I wish--" she said. "I--wi-ish--"

"What do you wi-ish?"

"Oh, I--I dunno what I wish!"

"If you ain't a card!"

He had lighted a cigar, and, leaning toward her, blew out a fragrant puff to her.

"M-m-m!" she said; "it's a Cleopatra."

"Nop."

"A El Dorado."

"Guess again."

"A what, then?"

"It's a Habana Queen. Habana because it reminds me of Hanna."

"Aw--you!"

At this crowning puerility Mr. Kaminer paused suddenly, as if he had detected in his laughter a bray.

"Is Habana in the war, Lew?"

"Darned if I know exactly."

"Ain't this war just terrible, Lew?"

"Don't let it worry you, girl. If it puts you out of business, remember, it's boosted my stocks fifty per cent. You know what I told you about chicken feed."

She buried her nose in her handkerchief, turning her head. Her eyes had begun to crinkle.

"It--it's just awful! All them sweet boys!"

"Now, cryin' ain't goin' to help. You 'ain't got no one marchin' off."

"That's just it. I 'ain't got no one. Everything is something awful, ain't it?" Her sympathies and her risibilities would bubble to the surface to confuse her. "Awful!"

He scraped one forefinger against the other.

"Cry-baby! Cry-baby, stick your little finger in your little eye!"

She regarded him wryly, her eyes crinkled now quite to slits.

"You can laugh!"

"Look at the cry-baby!"

"I get so darn blue."

"Now--now--"

"Honest to Gawd, Lew, I get so darn blue I could die."

"You're a nice girl, and I'd like to see anybody try to get fresh with you!"

"Do you--honest, Lew--like me?"

"There's something about you, girl, gets me every time. Cat-eyes! Kitty-eyes!"

"Sometimes I get so blue--get to thinkin' of home and the way it all happened. You know the way a person will. Home and the--divorce and the way it all happened with--him--and how I come here and--where it's got me, and--and I just say to myself, 'What's the use?' You know, Lew, the way a person will. Back there, anyways, I had a home. There's something in just havin' a home, lemme tell you. Bein' a somebody in your own home."

"You're a somebody any place they put you."

"You never seen the like the way it all happened, Lew. So quick! The day I took the train was like I was walkin' for good out of a dream. Not so much as a post-card from there since--"

"Uh--uh--now--cry-baby!"

"I--ain't exactly sorry, Lew; only God knows, more'n once in those twelve weeks out of work I was for goin' back and patchin' it up with him. I ain't exactly sorry, Lew, but--but there's only one thing on God's earth that keeps me from being sorry."

"What?"

"You."

He flecked his cigar, hitching his arm up along the chair-back, laughed, reddened slightly.

"That's the way to talk! These last two nights you been lightin' up with a man so he can get within ten feet of you. Now you're shoutin'!"

She drained her glass, blew her nose, and wiped her eyes.

She was sitting loosely forward now, her hand out on his.

"You're the only thing on God's earth that's kept me from--sneakin" back there--honest. Lew, I'd have gone back long ago and eat dirt to make it up with him--if not for you. I--ain't built like Kittie Scogin and those girls. I got to be self-respectin' with the fellows or nothing. They think more of you in the end--that's my theory."

"Sure!"

"A girl's fly or--she just naturally ain't that way. That's where all my misunderstanding began with Kittie--when she wanted me to move over in them rooms on Forty-ninth Street with her--a girl's that way or she just ain't that way!"

"Sure!"

"Lew--will you--are you--you ain't kiddin' me all these weeks? Taxicabbin' me all night in the Park and--drinkin' around this way all the time together. You 'ain't been kiddin' me, Lew?"

He shot up his cigar to an oblique.

"Now you're shoutin'!" he repeated. "It took three months to get you down off your high horse, but now we're talkin' the same language."

"Lew!"

"It ain't every girl I take up with; just let that sink in. I like 'em frisky, but I like 'em cautious. That's where you made a hit with me. Little of both. Them that nibble too easy ain't worth the catch."

She reached out the other hand, covering his with her both.

"You're--talkin' weddin'-bells, Lew?"

He regarded her, the ash of his cigar falling and scattering down his waistcoat.

"What bells?"

"Weddin', Lew." Her voice was as thin as a reed.

"O Lord!" he said, pushing back slightly from the table. "Have another fizz, girl, and by that time we'll be ready for a trip in my underground balloon. Waiter!"

She drew down his arm, quickly restraining it. She was not so sure now of controlling the muscles of her mouth.

"Lew!"

"Now--now--"

"Please, Lew! It's what kept me alive. Thinkin' you meant that. Please, Lew! You ain't goin' to turn out like all the rest in this town? You--the first fellow I ever went as far as--last night with. I'll stand by you, Lew, through thick and thin. You stand by me. You make it right with me, Lew, and--"

He cast a quick glance about, grasped at the sides of the table, and leaned toward her, _sotto_.

"For God's sake, hush! Are you crazy?"

"No," she said, letting the tears roll down over the too frank gyrations of her face--"no, I ain't crazy. I only want you to do the right thing by me, Lew. I'm--blue. I'm crazy afraid of the bigness of this town. There ain't a week I don't expect my notice here. It's got me. If you been stringin' me along like the rest of 'em, and I can't see nothing ahead of me but the struggle for a new job--and the tryin' to buck up against what a decent girl has got to--"

"Why, you're crazy with the heat, girl! I thought you and me was talking the same language. I want to do the right thing by you. Sure I do! Anything in reason is yours for the askin'. That's what I been comin' to."

"Then, Lew, I want you to do by me like you'd want your sister done by."

"I tell you you're crazy. You been hitting up too many fizzes lately."

"I--"

"You ain't fool enough to think I'm what you'd call a free man? I don't bring my family matters down here to air 'em over with you girls. You're darn lucky that I like you well enough to--well, that I like you as much as I do. Come, now; tell you what I'm goin' to do for you: You name your idea of what you want in the way of--"

"O God! Why don't I die? I ain't fit for nothing else!"

He cast a glance around their deserted edge of the room. A waiter, painstakingly oblivious, stood two tables back.

"Wouldn't I be better off out of it? Why don't I die?"

He was trembling down with a suppression of rage and concern for the rising gale in her voice.

"You can't make a scene in public with me and get away with it. If that's your game, it won't land you anywhere. Stop it! Stop it now and talk sense, or I'll get up. By God! if you get noisy, I'll get up and leave you here with the whole place givin' you the laugh. You can't throw a scare in me."

But Miss de Long's voice and tears had burst the dam of control. There was an outburst that rose and broke on a wave of hysteria.

"Lemme die--that's all I ask! What's there in it for me? What has there ever been? Don't do it, Lew! Don't--don't!"

It was then Mr. Kaminer pushed back his chair, flopped down his napkin, and rose, breathing heavily enough, but his face set in an exaggerated kind of quietude as he moved through the maze of tables, exchanged a check for his hat, and walked out.

For a stunned five minutes her tears, as it were, seared, she sat after him.

The waiter had withdrawn to the extreme left of the deserted edge of the room, talking behind his hand to two colleagues in servility, their faces listening and breaking into smiles.

Finally Miss de Long rose, moving through the zigzag paths of empty tables toward a deserted dressing-room. In there she slid into black-velvet slippers and a dark-blue walking-skirt, pulled on over the pink silk, tucking it up around the waist so that it did not sag from beneath the hem, squirmed into a black-velvet jacket with a false dicky made to emulate a blouse-front, and a blue-velvet hat hung with a curtain-like purple face-veil.

As she went out the side, Keeley's was closing its front doors.

Outside, not even to be gainsaid by Sixth Avenue, the night was like a moist flower held to the face. A spring shower, hardly fallen, was already drying on the sidewalks, and from the patch of Bryant Park across the maze of car-tracks there stole the immemorial scent of rain-water and black earth, a just-set-out crescent of hyacinths giving off their light steam of fragrance. How insidious is an old scent! It can creep into the heart like an ache. Who has not loved beside thyme or at the sweetness of dusk? Dear, silenced laughs can come back on a whiff from a florist's shop. Oh, there is a nostalgia lurks in old scents!

Even to Hanna de Long, hurrying eastward on Forty-second Street, huggingly against the shadow of darkened shop-windows, there was a new sting of tears at the smell of earth, daring, in the lull of a city night, to steal out.

There are always these dark figures that scuttle thus through the first hours of the morning.

Whither?

Twice remarks were flung after her from passing figures in slouch-hats--furtive remarks through closed lips.

At five minutes past one she was at the ticket-office grating of a train-terminal that was more ornate than a rajah's dream.

"Adalia--please. Huh? Ohio. Next train."

"Seven-seven. Track nine. Round trip?"

"N-no."

"Eighteen-fifty."

She again bit open the corner knot of her handkerchief.

* * * * *

When Hanna de Long, freshly train-washed of train dust, walked down Third Street away from the station, old man Rentzenauer, for forty-odd springs coaxing over the same garden, was spraying a hose over a side-yard of petunias, shirt-sleeved, his waistcoat hanging open, and in the purpling light his old head merging back against a story-and-a-half house the color of gray weather and half a century of service.

At sight of him who had shambled so taken-for-granted through all of her girlhood, such a trembling seized hold of Hanna de Long that she turned off down Amboy Street, making another wide detour to avoid a group on the Koerner porch, finally approaching Second Street from the somewhat straggly end of it farthest from the station.

She was trembling so that occasionally she stopped against a vertigo that went with it, wiped up under the curtain of purple veil at the beads of perspiration which would spring out along her upper lip. She was quite washed of rouge, except just a swift finger-stroke of it over the cheek-bones.

She had taken out the dicky, too, and for some reason filled in there with a flounce of pink net ripped off from the little ruffles that had flowed out from her sleeves. She was without baggage.

At Ludlow Street she could suddenly see the house, the trees meeting before it in a lace of green, the two iron jardinières empty. They had been painted, and were drying now of a clay-brown coat.

When she finally went up the brick walk, she thought once that she could not reach the bell with the strength left to pull it. She did, though, pressing with her two hands to her left side as she waited. The house was in the process of painting, too, still wet under a first wash of gray. The pergola, also.

The door swung back, and then a figure emerged full from a background of familiarly dim hallway and curve of banister. She was stout enough to be panting slightly, and above the pink-and-white-checked apron her face was ruddy, forty, and ever so inclined to smile.

"Yes?"

"Is--is--"

Out from the hallway shot a cocker spaniel, loose-eared, yapping.

"Queenie, Queenie--come back. She won't bite--Queenie--bad girl!--come back from that nasturtium-bed--bad girl!--all washed and combed so pretty for a romp with her favver when him come home so tired. Queenie!"

She caught her by a rear leg as she leaped back, wild to rollick, tucking her under one arm, administering three diminutive punishments on the shaggy ears.

"Bad! Bad!"

"Is Mr.--Burkhardt--home?"

"Aw, now, he ain't! I sent him down by Gredel's nurseries on his way home to-night, for some tulip-bulbs for my iron jardinières. He ought to be back any minute if he 'ain't stopped to brag with old man Gredel that our arbutus beats his." Then, smiling and rubbing with the back of her free hand at a flour-streak across her cheek: "If--if it's the lady from the orphan asylum come to see about the--the little kid we want--is there anything I can do for you? I'm his wife. Won't you come in?"

"Oh no!" said Miss de Long, now already down two of the steps. "I--I--Oh no, no!--thank you! Oh no--no!--thank you!"

She walked swiftly, the purple veil blown back and her face seeming to look out of it whitely, so whitely that she became terrible.

Night was at hand, and Adalia was drawing down its front shades.

VII

GET READY THE WREATHS

Where St. Louis begins to peter out into brick- and limestone-kilns and great scars of unworked and overworked quarries, the first and more unpretentious of its suburbs take up--Benson, Maplehurst, and Ridgeway Heights intervening with one-story brick cottages and two-story packing-cases--between the smoke of the city and the carefully parked Queen Anne quietude of Glenwood and Croton Grove.

Over Benson hangs a white haze of limestone, gritty with train and foundry smoke. At night the lime-kilns, spotted with white deposits, burn redly, showing through their open doors like great, inflamed diphtheretic throats, tongues of flame bursting and licking out.

Winchester Road, which runs out from the heart of the city to string these towns together, is paved with brick, and its traffic, for the most part, is the great, tin-tired dump-carts of the quarries and steel interurban electric cars which hum so heavily that even the windows of outlying cottages titillate.

For blocks, from Benson to Maplehurst and from Maplehurst to Ridgeway Heights, Winchester Road repeats itself in terms of the butcher, the baker, the corner saloon. A feed-store. A monument- and stone-cutter. A confectioner. A general-merchandise store, with a glass case of men's collars outside the entrance. The butcher, the baker, the corner saloon.

At Benson, where this highway cuts through, the city, wreathed in smoke, and a great oceanic stretch of roofs are in easy view, and at closer range, an outlying section of public asylums for the city's discard of its debility and its senility.

Jutting a story above the one-storied march of Winchester Road, The Convenience Merchandise Corner, Benson, overlooks, from the southeast up-stairs window, a remote view of the City Hospital, the Ferris-wheel of an amusement park, and on clear days the oceanic waves of roof. Below, within the store, that view is entirely obliterated by a brace of shelves built across the corresponding window and brilliantly stacked with ribbons of a score of colors and as many widths. A considerable flow of daylight thus diverted, The Convenience Merchandise Corner, even of early afternoon, fades out into half-discernible corners; a rear-wall display of overalls and striped denim coats crowded back into indefinitude, the haberdashery counter, with a giant gilt shirt-stud suspended above, hardly more outstanding.

Even the notions and dry-goods, flanking the right wall in stacks and bolts, merge into blur, the outline of a white-sateen and corseted woman's torso surmounting the topmost of the shelves with bold curvature.

With spring sunshine even hot against the steel rails of Winchester Road, and awnings drawn against its inroads into the window display, Mrs. Shila Coblenz, routing gloom, reached up tiptoe across the haberdashery counter for the suspended chain of a cluster of bulbs, the red of exertion rising up the taut line of throat and lifted chin.

"A little light on the subject, Milt."

"Let me, Mrs. C."

Facing her from the outer side of the counter, Mr. Milton Bauer stretched also, his well-pressed, pin-checked coat crawling up.

All things swam out into the glow. The great suspended stud; the background of shelves and boxes; the scissors-like overalls against the wall; a clothesline of children's factory-made print frocks; a center-bin of women's untrimmed hats; a headless dummy beside the door, enveloped in a long-sleeved gingham apron.

Beneath the dome of the wooden stud, Mrs. Shila Coblenz, of not too fulsome but the hour-glass proportions of two decades ago, smiled, her black eyes, ever so quick to dart, receding slightly as the cheeks lifted.

"Two twenty-five, Milt, for those ribbed assorted sizes and reinforced heels. Leave or take. Bergdorff & Sloan will quote me the whole mill at that price."

With his chest across the counter and legs out violently behind, Mr. Bauer flung up a glance from his order-pad.

"Have a heart, Mrs. C. I'm getting two-forty for that stocking from every house in town. The factory can't turn out the orders fast enough at that price. An up-to-date woman like you mustn't make a noise like before the war."

"Leave or take."

"You could shave an egg," he said.

"And rush up those printed lawns. There was two in this morning, sniffing around for spring dimities."

"Any more cotton goods? Next month, this time, you'll be paying an advance of four cents on percales."

"Stocked."

"Can't tempt you with them wash silks, Mrs. C.? Neatest little article on the market to-day."

"No demand. They finger it up, and then buy the cotton stuffs. Every time I forget my trade hacks rock instead of clips bonds for its spending-money I get stung."

"This here wash silk, Mrs. C., would--"

"Send me up a dress-pattern off this coral-pink sample for Selene."

"This here dark mulberry, Mrs. C., would suit you something immense."

"That'll be about all."

He flopped shut his book, snapping a rubber band about it and inserting it in an inner coat pocket.

"You ought to stick to them dark, winy shades, Mrs. C. With your coloring and black hair and eyes, they bring you out like a gipsy. Never seen you look better than at the Y.M.H.A. entertainment."

Quick color flowed down her open throat and into her shirtwaist. It was as if the platitude merged with the very corpuscles of a blush that sank down into thirsty soil.

"You boys," she said, "come out here and throw in a jolly with every bill of goods. I'll take a good fat discount instead."

"Fact. Never seen you look better. When you got out on the floor in that stamp-your-foot kind of dance with old man Shulof, your hand on your hip and your head jerking it up, there wasn't a girl on the floor, your own daughter included, could touch you, and I'm giving it to you straight."

"That old thing! It's a Russian folk-dance my mother taught me the first year we were in this country. I was three years old then, and, when she got just crazy with homesickness, we used to dance it to each other evenings on the kitchen floor."

"Say, have you heard the news?"

"No."

"Guess."

"Can't."

"Hammerstein is bringing over the crowned heads of Europe for vaudeville."

Mrs. Coblenz moved back a step, her mouth falling open.

"Why, Milton Bauer, in the old country a man could be strung up for saying less than that!"

"That didn't get across. Try another. A Frenchman and his wife were traveling in Russia, and--"

"If--if you had an old mother like mine up-stairs, Milton, eating out her heart and her days and her weeks and her months over a husband's grave somewhere in Siberia and a son's grave somewhere in Kishinef, you wouldn't see the joke neither."

Mr. Bauer executed a self-administered pat sharply against the back of his hand.

"Keeper," he said, "put me in the brain ward. I--I'm sorry, Mrs. C., so help me! Didn't mean to. How is your mother, Mrs. C.? Seems to me, at the dance the other night, Selene said she was fine and dandy."

"Selene ain't the best judge of her poor old grandmother. It's hard for a young girl to have patience for old age sitting and chewing all day over the past. It's right pitiful the way her grandmother knows it, too, and makes herself talk English all the time to please the child and tries to perk up for her. Selene, thank God, 'ain't suffered, and can't sympathize!"

"What's ailing her, Mrs. C.? I kinda miss seeing the old lady sitting down here in the store."

"It's the last year or so, Milt. Just like all of a sudden a woman as active as mama always was, her health and--her mind kind of went off with a pop."

"Thu! Thu!"

"Doctor says with care she can live for years, but--but it seems terrible the way her--poor mind keeps skipping back. Past all these thirty years in America to--even weeks before I was born. The night they--took my father off to Siberia, with his bare feet in the snow--for distributing papers they found on him--papers that used the word 'svoboda'--'freedom.' And the time, ten years later--they shot down my brother right in front of her for--the same reason. She keeps living it over--living it over till I--could die."

"Say, ain't that just a shame, though!"

"Living it, and living it, and living it! The night with me, a heavy three-year-old, in her arms that she got us to the border, dragging a pack of linens with her! The night my father's feet were bleeding in the snow, when they took him! How with me a kid in the crib, my--my brother's face was crushed in--with a heel and a spur. All night, sometimes, she cries in her sleep--begging to go back to find the graves. All day she sits making raffia wreaths to take back--making wreaths--making wreaths!"

"Say, ain't that tough!"

"It's a godsend she's got the eyes to do it. It's wonderful the way she reads--in English, too. There ain't a daily she misses. Without them and the wreaths--I dunno--I just dunno. Is--is it any wonder, Milt, I--I can't see the joke?"

"My God, no!"

"I'll get her back, though."

"Why, you--she can't get back there, Mrs. C."

"There's a way. Nobody can tell me there's not. Before the war--before she got like this, seven hundred dollars would have done it for both of us--and it will again, after the war. She's got the bank-book, and every week that I can squeeze out above expenses, she sees the entry for herself. I'll get her back. There's a way lying around somewhere. God knows why she should eat out her heart to go back--but she wants it. God, how she wants it!"

"Poor old dame!"

"You boys guy me with my close-fisted buying these last two years. It's up to me, Milt, to squeeze this old shebang dry. There's not much more than a living in it at best, and now, with Selene grown up and naturally wanting to have it like other girls, it ain't always easy to see my way clear. But I'll do it, if I got to trust the store for a year to a child like Selene. I'll get her back."

"You can call on me, Mrs. C., to keep my eye on things while you're gone."

"You boys are one crowd of true blues, all right. There ain't a city salesman comes out here I wouldn't trust to the limit."

"You just try me out."

"Why, just to show you how a woman don't know how many real friends she has got, why--even Mark Haas, of the Mound City Silk Company, a firm I don't do a hundred dollars' worth of business with a year, I wish you could have heard him the other night at the Y.M.H.A., a man you know for yourself just goes there to be sociable with the trade."

"Fine fellow, Mark Haas!"

"'When the time comes, Mrs. Coblenz,' he says, 'that you want to make that trip, just you let me know. Before the war there wasn't a year I didn't cross the water twice, maybe three times, for the firm. I don't know there's much I can do; it ain't so easy to arrange for Russia, but, just the same, you let me know when you're ready to make that trip.' Just like that he said it. That from Mark Haas!"

"And a man like Haas don't talk that way if he don't mean it."

"Mind you, not a hundred dollars a year business with him. I haven't got the demands for silks."

"That wash silk I'm telling you about, though, Mrs. C., does up like a--"

"There's ma thumping with the poker on the up-stairs floor. When it's closing-time she begins to get restless. I--I wish Selene would come in. She went out with Lester Goldmark in his little flivver, and I get nervous about automobiles."

Mr. Bauer slid an open-face watch from his waistcoat.

"Good Lord! five-forty, and I've just got time to sell the Maplehurst Emporium a bill of goods!"

"Good-night, Milt; and mind you put up that order of assorted neckwear yourself. Greens in ready-tieds are good sellers for this time of the year, and put in some reds and purples for the teamsters."

"No sooner said than done."

"And come out for supper some Sunday night, Milt. It does mama good to have young people around."

"I'm yours."

"Good-night, Milt."

He reached across the counter, placing his hand over hers.

"Good-night, Mrs. C.," he said, a note lower in his throat; "and remember that call-on-me stuff wasn't all conversation."

"Good-night, Milt," said Mrs. Coblenz, a coating of husk over her own voice and sliding her hand out from beneath, to top his. "You--you're all right!"

* * * * *

Up-stairs, in a too tufted and too crowded room directly over the frontal half of the store, the window overlooking the remote sea of city was turning taupe, the dusk of early spring, which is faintly tinged with violet, invading. Beside the stove, a base-burner with faint fire showing through its mica, the identity of her figure merged with the fat upholstery of the chair, except where the faint pink through the mica lighted up old flesh, Mrs. Miriam Horowitz, full of years and senile with them, wove with grasses, the écru of her own skin, wreaths that had mounted to a great stack in a bedroom cupboard.

A clock, with a little wheeze and burring attached to each chime, rang six, and upon it Mrs. Coblenz, breathing from a climb, opened the door.

"Ma, why didn't you rap for Katie to come up and light the gas? You'll ruin your eyes, dearie."

She found out a match, immediately lighting two jets of a center-chandelier, turning them down from singing, drawing the shades of the two front and the southeast windows, stooping over the upholstered chair to imprint a light kiss.

"A fine day, mama. There'll be an entry this week. Thirty dollars and thirteen cents and another call for garden implements. I think I'll lay in a hardware line after we--we get back. I can use the lower shelf of the china-table, eh, ma?"

Mrs. Horowitz, whose face, the color of old linen in the yellowing, emerged rather startling from the still black hair strained back from it, lay back in her chair, turning her profile against the upholstered back, half a wreath and a trail of raffia sliding to the floor. Age had sapped from beneath the skin, so that every curve had collapsed to bagginess, the cheeks and the underchin sagging with too much skin. Even the hands were crinkled like too large gloves, a wide, curiously etched marriage band hanging loosely from the third finger.

Mrs. Goblenz stooped, recovering the wreath.

"Say, mama, this one is a beauty! That's a new weave, ain't it? Here, work some more, dearie--till Selene comes with your evening papers."

With her profile still to the chair-back, a tear oozed down the corrugated face of Mrs. Horowitz's cheek. Another.

"Now, mama! Now, mama!"

"I got a heaviness--here--inside. I got a heaviness--"

Mrs. Coblenz slid down to her knees beside the chair.

"Now, mama; shame on my little mama! Is that the way to act when Shila comes up after a good day? 'Ain't we got just lots to be thankful for--the business growing and the bank-book growing, and our Selene on top? Shame on mama!"

"I got a heaviness--here--inside--here."

Mrs. Coblenz reached up for the old hand, patting it.

"It's nothing, mama--a little nervousness."

"I'm an old woman. I--"

"And just think, Shila's mama, Mark Haas is going to get us letters and passports and--"

"My son--my boy--his father before him--"

"Mama--mama, please don't let a spell come on! It's all right. Shila's going to fix it. Any day now, maybe--"

"You'm a good girl. You'm a good girl, Shila." Tears were coursing down to a mouth that was constantly wry with the taste of them.

"And you're a good mother, mama. Nobody knows better than me how good."

"You'm a good girl, Shila."

"I was thinking last night, mama, waiting up for Selene--just thinking how all the good you've done ought to keep your mind off the spells, dearie."

"My son--"

"Why, a woman with as much good to remember as you've got oughtn't to have time for spells. I got to thinking about Coblenz, mama, how--you never did want him, and when I--I went and did it, anyway, and made my mistake, you stood by me to--to the day he died. Never throwing anything up to me! Never nothing but my good little mother, working her hands to the bone after he got us out here to help meet the debts he left us. Ain't that a satisfaction for you to be able to sit and think, mama, how you helped--"

"His feet--blood from my heart in the snow--blood from my heart!"

"The past is gone, darling. What's the use tearing yourself to pieces with it? Them years in New York when it was a fight even for bread, and them years here trying to raise Selene and get the business on a footing, you didn't have time to brood then, mama. That's why, dearie, if only you'll keep yourself busy with something--the wreaths--the--"

"His feet--blood from my--"

"But I'm going to take you back, mama. To papa's grave. To Aylorff's. But don't eat your heart out until it comes, darling. I'm going to take you back, mama, with every wreath in the stack; only, you mustn't eat out your heart in spells. You mustn't, mama; you mustn't."

Sobs rumbled up through Mrs. Horowitz, which her hand to her mouth tried to constrict.

"For his people he died. The papers--I begged he should burn them--he couldn't--I begged he should keep in his hate--he couldn't--in the square he talked it--the soldiers--he died for his people--they got him--the soldiers--his feet in the snow when they took him--the blood in the snow--O my God!--my--God!"

"Mama darling, please don't go over it all again. What's the use making yourself sick? Please!"

She was well forward in her chair now, winding her dry hands one over the other with a small rotary motion.

"I was rocking--Shila-baby in my lap--stirring on the fire black lentils for my boy--black lentils--he--"

"Mama!"

"My boy. Like his father before him. My--"

"Mama, please! Selene is coming any minute now. You know how she hates it. Don't let yourself think back, mama. A little will-power, the doctor says, is all you need. Think of to-morrow, mama; maybe, if you want, you can come down and sit in the store awhile and--"

"I was rocking. O my God! I was rocking, and--"

"Don't get to it--mama, please! Don't rock yourself that way! You'll get yourself dizzy! Don't, ma; don't!"

"Outside--my boy--the holler--O God! in my ears all my life! My boy--the papers--the swords--Aylorff--Aylorff--"

"'Shh-h-h--mama--"

"It came through his heart out the back--a blade with two sides--out the back when I opened the door; the spur in his face when he fell, Shila--the spur in his face--the beautiful face of my boy--my Aylorff--my husband before him--that died to make free!" And fell back, bathed in the sweat of the terrific hiccoughing of sobs.

"Mama, mama! My God! What shall we do? These spells! You'll kill yourself, darling. I'm going to take you back, dearie--ain't that enough? I promise. I promise. You mustn't, mama! These spells--they ain't good for a young girl like Selene to hear. Mama, 'ain't you got your own Shila--your own Selene? Ain't that something? Ain't it? Ain't it?"

Large drops of sweat had come out and a state of exhaustion that swept completely over, prostrating the huddled form in the chair.

"Bed--my bed!"

With her arms twined about the immediately supporting form of her daughter, her entire weight relaxed, and footsteps that dragged without lift, one after the other, Mrs. Horowitz groped out, one hand feeling in advance, into the gloom of a room adjoining.

"Rest! O my God! rest!"

"Yes, yes, mama; lean on me."

"My--bed."

"Yes, yes, darling."

"Bed."

Her voice had died now to a whimper that lay on the room after she had passed out of it.

When Selene Coblenz, with a gust that swept the room, sucking the lace curtains back against the panes, flung open the door upon that chromatic scene, the two jets of gas were singing softly into its silence, and within the nickel-trimmed baseburner the pink mica had cooled to gray. Sweeping open that door, she closed it softly, standing for the moment against it, her hand crossed in back and on the knob. It was as if--standing there with her head cocked and beneath a shadowy blue sailor-hat, a smile coming out--something within her was playing, sweetly insistent to be heard. Philomela, at the first sound of her nightingale self, must have stood thus, trembling with melody. Opposite her, above the crowded mantelpiece and surmounted by a raffia wreath, the enlarged-crayon gaze of her deceased maternal grandfather, abetted by a horrible device of photography, followed her, his eyes focusing the entire room at a glance. Impervious to that scrutiny, Miss Coblenz moved a tiptoe step or two farther into the room, lifting off her hat, staring and smiling through a three-shelved cabinet of knickknacks at what she saw far and beyond. Beneath the two jets, high lights in her hair came out, bronze showing through the brown waves and the patches of curls brought out over her cheeks.

In her dark-blue dress, with the row of silver buttons down what was hip before the hipless age, the chest sufficiently concave and the silhouette a mere stroke of a hard pencil, Miss Selene Coblenz measured up and down to America's Venus de Milo, whose chief curvature is of the spine. Slim-etched, and that slimness enhanced by a conscious kind of collapse beneath the blue-silk girdle that reached up half-way to her throat, hers were those proportions which strong women, eschewing the sweet-meat, would earn by the sweat of the Turkish bath.

When Miss Coblenz caught her eye in the square of mirror above the mantelpiece, her hands flew to her cheeks to feel of their redness. They were soft cheeks, smooth with the pollen of youth, and hands still casing them, she moved another step toward the portièred door.

"Mama!"

Mrs. Coblenz emerged immediately, finger up for silence, kissing her daughter on the little spray of cheek-curls.

"'Shh-h-h! Gramaw just had a terrible spell."

She dropped down into the upholstered chair beside the base-burner, the pink and moisture of exertion out in her face, took to fanning herself with the end of a face-towel flung across her arm.

"Poor gramaw!" she said. "Poor gramaw!"

Miss Coblenz sat down on the edge of a slim, home-gilded chair, and took to gathering the blue-silk dress into little plaits at her knee.

"Of course, if you don't want to know where I've been--or anything--"

Mrs. Coblenz jerked herself to the moment.

"Did mama's girl have a good time? Look at your dress, all dusty! You oughtn't to wear your best in that little flivver."

Suddenly Miss Coblenz raised her glance, her red mouth bunched, her eyes all iris.

"Of course--if you don't want to know--anything."

At that large, brilliant gaze, Mrs. Coblenz leaned forward, quickened.

"Why, Selene!"

"Well, why--why don't you ask me something?"

"Why, I--I dunno, honey. Did--did you and Lester have a nice ride?"

There hung a slight pause, and then a swift moving and crumpling-up of Miss Coblenz on the floor beside her mother's knee.

"You know--only, you won't ask."

With her hand light upon her daughter's hair, Mrs. Coblenz leaned forward, her bosom rising to faster breathing.

"Why--Selene--I--Why--"

"We--we were speeding along, and--all of a sudden, out of a clear sky, he--he popped. He wants it in June, so we can make it our honeymoon to his new territory out in Oklahoma. He knew he was going to pop, he said, ever since that first night he saw me at the Y.M.H.A. He says to his uncle Mark, the very next day in the store, he says to him, 'Uncle Mark,' he says, 'I've met _the_ little girl.' He says he thinks more of my little finger than all of his regular crowd of girls in town put together. He wants to live in one of the built-in-bed flats on Wasserman Avenue, like all the swell young marrieds. He's making twenty-six hundred now, mama, and if he makes good in the new Oklahoma territory, his Uncle Mark is--is going to take care of him better. Ain't it like a dream, mama--your little Selene all of a sudden in with--the somebodies?"

Immediate tears were already finding staggering procession down Mrs. Coblenz's face, her hovering arms completely encircling the slight figure at her feet.

"My little girl! My little Selene! My all!"

"I'll be marrying into one of the best families in town, ma. A girl who marries a nephew of Mark Haas can hold up her head with the best of them. There's not a boy in town with a better future than Lester. Like Lester says, everything his Uncle Mark touches turns to gold, and he's already touched Lester. One of the best known men on Washington Avenue for his blood-uncle, and on his poor dead father's side related to the Katz & Harberger Harbergers. Was I right, mama, when I said if you'd only let me stop school I'd show you? Was I right, momsie?"

"My baby! It's like I can't realize it. So young!"

"He took the measure of my finger, mama, with a piece of string. A diamond, he says, not too flashy, but neat."

"We have 'em, and we suffer for 'em, and we lose 'em."

"He's going to trade in the flivver for a chummy roadster, and--"

"Oh, darling, it's like I can't bear it!"

At that Miss Coblenz sat back on her tall wooden heels, mauve spats crinkling.

"Well, you're a merry little future mother-in-law, momsie!"

"It ain't that, baby. I'm happy that my girl has got herself up in the world with a fine upright boy like Lester; only--you can't understand, babe, till you've got something of your own flesh and blood that belongs to you, that I--I couldn't feel anything except that a piece of my heart was going if--if it was a king you was marrying."

"Now, momsie, it's not like I was moving a thousand miles away. You can be glad I don't have to go far, to New York or to Cleveland, like Alma Yawitz."

"I am! I am!"

"Uncle--Uncle Mark, I guess, will furnish us up like he did Leon and Irma--only, I don't want mahogany; I want Circassian walnut. He gave them their flat-silver, too, Puritan design, for an engagement present. Think of it, mama, me having that stuck-up Irma Sinsheimer for a relation! It always made her sore when I got chums with Amy at school and got my nose in it with the Acme crowd, and--and she'll change her tune now, I guess, me marrying her husband's second cousin."

"Didn't Lester want to--to come in for a while, Selene, to--to see--me?"

Sitting there on her heels, Miss Coblenz looked away, answering with her face in profile.

"Yes; only--I--well, if you want to know it, mama, it's no fun for a girl to bring a boy like Lester up here in--in this crazy room, all hung up with gramaw's wreaths and half the time her sitting out there in the dark, looking in at us through the door and talking to herself."

"Gramaw's an old--"

"Is it any wonder I'm down at Amy's half the time? How do you think a girl feels to have gramaw keep hanging onto that old black wig of hers and not letting me take the crayons or wreaths down off the wall? In Lester's crowd they don't know nothing about revolutionary stuff and persecutions. Amy's grandmother don't even talk with an accent, and Lester says his grandmother came from Alsace-Lorraine. That's French. They think only tailors and old-clothes men and--."

"Selene!"

"Well, they do. You--you're all right, mama, as up to date as any of them, but how do you think a girl feels, with gramaw always harping right in front of everybody the way granpa was a revolutionist and was hustled off barefooted to Siberia like a tramp? And the way she was cooking black beans when my uncle died. Other girls' grandmothers don't tell everything they know. Alma Yawitz's grandmother wears lorgnettes, and you told me yourself they came from nearly the same part of the Pale as gramaw. But you don't hear them remembering it. Alma Yawitz says she's Alsace-Lorraine on both sides. People don't tell everything they know. Anyway where a girl's got herself as far as I have!"

Through sobs that rocked her, Mrs. Coblenz looked down upon her daughter.

"Your poor old grandmother don't deserve that from you! In her day she worked her hands to the bone for you. With the kind of father you had we might have died in the gutter but for how she helped to keep us out, you ungrateful girl--your poor old grandmother, that's suffered so terrible!"

"I know it, mama, but so have other people suffered."

"She's old, Selene--old."

"I tell you it's the way you indulge her, mama. I've seen her sitting here as perk as you please, and the minute you come in the room down goes her head like--like she was dying."

"It's her mind, Selene--that's going. That's why I feel if I could only get her back. She ain't old, gramaw ain't. If I could only get her back where she--could see for herself--the graves--is all she needs. All old people think of--the grave. It's eating her--eating her mind. Mark Haas is going to fix it for me after the war--maybe before--if he can. That's the only way poor gramaw can live--or die--happy, Selene. Now--now that my--my little girl ain't any longer my responsibility, I--I'm going to take her back--my little--girl"--her hand reached out, caressing the smooth head, her face projected forward and the eyes yearning down--"my all."

"It's you will be my responsibility now, ma."

"No! No!"

"The first thing Lester says was a flat on Wasserman and a spare room for Mother Coblenz when she wants to come down. Wasn't it sweet for him to put it that way right off, ma? 'Mother Coblenz,' he says."

"He's a good boy, Selene. It'll be a proud day for me and gramaw. Gramaw mustn't miss none of it. He's a good boy and a fine family."

"That's why, mama, we--got to--to do it up right."

"Lester knows, child, he's not marrying a rich girl."

"A girl don't have to--be rich to get married right."

"You'll have as good as mama can afford to give it to her girl."

"It--it would be different if Lester's uncle and all wasn't in the Acme Club crowd, and if I hadn't got in with all that bunch. It's the last expense I'll ever be to you, mama."

"Oh, baby, don't say that!"

"I--me and Lester--Lester and me were talking, mama--when the engagement's announced next week--a reception--"

"We can clear out this room, move the bed out of gramaw's room into ours, and serve the ice-cream and cake in--"

"Oh, mama, I don't mean--that!"

"What?"

"Who ever heard of having a reception _here_! People won't come from town 'way out to this old--cabbage-patch. Even Gertie Wolf, with their big house on West Pine Boulevard, had her reception at the Walsingham Hotel. You--We--can't expect Mark Haas and all the relations--the Sinsheimers-- and--all to come out here. I'd rather not have any."

"But, Selene, everybody knows we ain't millionaires, and that you got in with that crowd through being friends at school with Amy Rosen. All the city salesmen and the boys on Washington Avenue, even Mark Haas himself, that time he was in the store with Lester, knows the way we live. You don't need to be ashamed of your little home, Selene, even if it ain't on West Pine Boulevard."

"It'll be--your last expense, mama. The Walsingham, that's where the girl that Lester Goldmark marries is expected to have her reception."

"But, Selene, mama can't afford nothing like that."

Pink swam up into Miss Coblenz's face, and above the sheer-white collar there was a little beating movement at the throat, as if something were fluttering within.

"I--I'd just as soon not get married as--as not to have it like other girls."

"But, Selene--"

"If I--can't have a trousseau like other girls and the things that go with marrying into a--a family like Lester's--I--then--there's no use. I--I can't! I--wouldn't!"

She was fumbling, now, for a handkerchief, against tears that were imminent.

"Why, baby, a girl couldn't have a finer trousseau than the old linens back yet from Russia that me and gramaw got saved up for our girl--linen that can't be bought these days. Bed-sheets that gramaw herself carried to the border, and--"

"Oh, I know! I knew you'd try to dump that stuff on me. That old, worm-eaten stuff in gramaw's chest."

"It's hand-woven, Selene, with--"

"I wouldn't have that yellow old stuff--that old-fashioned junk--if I didn't have any trousseau. If I can't afford monogrammed up-to-date linens, like even Alma Yawitz, and a--a pussy-willow-taffeta reception dress, I wouldn't have any. I wouldn't." Her voice, crowded with passion and tears, rose to the crest of a sob. "I--I'd die first!"

"Selene, Selene, mama 'ain't got the money. If she had it, wouldn't she be willing to take the very last penny to give her girl the kind of a wedding she wants? A trousseau like Alma's cost a thousand dollars, if it cost a cent. Her table-napkins alone, they say, cost thirty-six dollars a dozen, un-monogrammed. A reception at the Walsingham costs two hundred dollars, if it costs a cent. Selene, mama will make for you every sacrifice she can afford, but she 'ain't got the money!"

"You--have got the money!"

"So help me God, Selene! You know, with the quarries shut down, what business has been. You know how--sometimes even to make ends meet it is a pinch. You're an ungrateful girl, Selene, to ask what I ain't able to do for you. A child like you, that's been indulged, that I 'ain't even asked ever in her life to help a day down in the store. If I had the money, God knows you should be married in real lace, with the finest trousseau a girl ever had. But I 'ain't got the money--I 'ain't got the money."

"You have got the money! The book in gramaw's drawer is seven hundred and forty. I guess I ain't blind. I know a thing or two."

"Why, Selene! That's gramaw's--to go back--"

"You mean the bank-book's hers?"

"That's gramaw's, to go back--home on. That's the money for me to take gramaw and her wreaths back home on."

"There you go--talking luny."

"Selene!"

"Well, I'd like to know what else you'd call it, kidding yourself along like that."

"You--"

"All right. If you think gramaw, with her life all lived, comes first before me, with all my life to live--all right!"

"Your poor old--"

"It's always been gramaw first in this house, anyway. I couldn't even have company since I'm grown up because the way she's always allowed around. Nobody can say I ain't good to gramaw; Lester says it's beautiful the way I am with her, remembering always to bring the newspapers and all, but just the same, I know when right's right and wrong's wrong. If my life ain't more important than gramaw's, with hers all lived, all right. Go ahead!"

"Selene, Selene, ain't it coming to gramaw, after all her years' hard work helping us that--she should be entitled to go back with her wreaths for the graves? Ain't she entitled to die with that off her poor old mind? You bad, ungrateful girl, you, it's coming to a poor old woman that's suffered as terrible as gramaw that I should find a way to take her back."

"Take her back. Where--to jail? To prison in Siberia herself--"

"There's a way--"

"You know gramaw's too old to take a trip like that. You know in your own heart she won't ever see that day. Even before the war, much less now, there wasn't a chance for her to get passports back there. I don't say it ain't all right to kid her along, but when it comes to--to keeping me out of the--the biggest thing that can happen to a girl--when gramaw wouldn't know the difference if you keep showing her the bank-book--it ain't right. That's what it ain't. It ain't right!"

In the smallest possible compass, Miss Coblenz crouched now upon the floor, head down somewhere in her knees, and her curving back racked with rising sobs.

"Selene--but some day--"

"Some day nothing! A woman like gramaw can't do much more than go down-town once a year, and then you talk about taking her to Russia! You can't get in there, I--tell you--no way you try to fix it after--the way gramaw--had--to leave. Even before the war Ray Letsky's father couldn't get back on business. There's nothing for her there, even after she gets there. In thirty years, do you think you can find those graves? Do you know the size of Siberia? No! But I got to pay--I got to pay for gramaw's nonsense. But I won't. I won't go to Lester if I can't go right. I--."

"Baby, don't cry so--for God's sake, don't cry so!"

"I wish I was dead!"

"'Sh-h-h! You'll wake gramaw."

"I do!"

"O God, help me to do the right thing!"

"If gramaw could understand, she'd be the first one to tell you the right thing. Anybody would."

"No! No! That little bank-book and its entries are her life--her life."

"She don't need to know, mama. I'm not asking that. That's the way they always do with old people to keep them satisfied. Just humor 'em. Ain't I the one with life before me--ain't I, mama?"

"O God, show me the way!"

"If there was a chance, you think I'd be spoiling things for gramaw? But there ain't, mama--not one."

"I keep hoping if not before, then after the war. With the help of Mark Haas--"

"With the book in her drawer, like always, and the entries changed once in a while, she'll never know the difference. I swear to God she'll never know the difference, mama!"

"Poor gramaw!"

"Mama, promise me--your little Selene. Promise me?"

"Selene, Selene, can we keep it from her?"

"I swear we can, mama."

"Poor, poor gramaw!"

"Mama? Mama darling?"

"O God, show me the way!"

"Ain't it me that's got life before me? My whole life?"

"Yes--Selene."

"Then, mama, please--you will--you will--darling?"

"Yes, Selene."

In a large, all-frescoed, seventy-five-dollar-an-evening-with-lights and cloak-room-service ballroom of the Hotel Walsingham, a family hostelry in that family circle of St. Louis known as its West End, the city holds not a few of its charity-whists and benefit musicales; on a dais which can be carried in for the purpose, morning readings of "Little Moments from Little Plays," and with the introduction of a throne-chair, the monthly lodge-meetings of the Lady Mahadharatas of America. For weddings and receptions, a lane of red carpet leads up to the slight dais; and lined about the brocade and paneled walls, gilt-and-brocade chairs, with the crest of Walsingham in padded embroidery on the backs. Crystal chandeliers, icicles of dripping light, glow down upon a scene of parquet floor, draped velours, and mirrors wreathed in gilt.