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—.”