“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.”