He sat well up, the light reflecting in points off his polished glasses.

“Mother, you’re joking!”

Her hands were out across the table now, almost reaching his, her face close and screwed under the lights.

“When—­when you lost out that time five years ago on ‘Pan-America’ and I seen how Linger made a fortune out of it, I says to myself, ’It can never happen again.’  You remember the next January when you got your raise to fifty and I wouldn’t move out of this flat, and instead gave up having Annie in, that was what I had in my head, Harry.  It wasn’t only for sending Edwin to high school; it was for—­my other boy, too, Harry, so it couldn’t happen again.”

“Millie, you mean—­”

“You ain’t got much idea, Harry, of what I been doing.  You don’t know it, honey, but, honest, I ain’t bought a stitch of new clothes for five years.  You know I ain’t, somehow—­made friends for myself since we moved here.”

“It’s the hard shell town of the world!”

“You ain’t had time, Harry, to ask yourself what becomes of the house allowance, with me stinting so.  Why, I—­I won’t spend car fare, Harry, since ‘Pan-America,’ if I can help it.  This meal I served up here t-night, with all the high cost of living, didn’t cost us two thirds what it might if—­if I didn’t have it all figured up.  Where do you think your laundry-money that I’ve been saving goes, Harry?  The marmalade-money I made the last two Christmases?  The velvet muff I made myself out of the fur-money you give me?  It’s all in the Farmers’ Trust, Harry.  With the two hundred and ten I had to start with five years ago, it’s twenty-six hundred and seventeen dollars and fifty cents now.  I’ve been saving it for this kind of a minute, Harry.  When it got three thousand, I was going to tell you, anyways.  Is that enough, Harry, to do the Goldfinch-Goetz spectacle on your own hook?  Is it, Harry?”

He regarded her in a heavy-jawed kind of stupefaction.

“Woman alive!” he said.  “Great Heavens, woman alive!”

“It’s in the bank, waiting, Harry—­all for you.”

“Why, Millie, I—­I don’t know what to say.”

“I want you to have it, Harry.  It’s yours.  Out of your pocket, back into it.  You got capital to start with now.”

“I—­Why, I can’t take that money, Millie, from you!”

“From your wife?  When she stinted and scrimped and saved on shoe-leather for the happiness of it?”

“Why, this is no sure thing I got on the brain.”

“Nothing is.”

“I got nothing but my own judgment to rely on.”

“You been right three times, Harry.”

“There’s not as big a gamble in the world as the show business.  I can’t take your savings, mother.”

“Harry, if—­if you don’t, I’ll tear it up.  It’s what I’ve worked for.  I’m too tired, Harry, to stand much.  If you don’t take it, I—­I’m too tired, Harry, to stand it.”