“Irving, quit your noise in the hall.”

“Aw!”

“Ain’t you ashamed, a big boy like you, and Mrs. Suss with her neuralgia?”

“Aw!”—­the slam of a door clipping off this insolence.

After a while she would resume her climb.

And yet in Mrs. Kaufman’s private boarding-house in West Eighty-ninth Street, one of a breastwork of brownstone fronts, lined up stoop for stoop, story for story, and ash-can for ash-can, there were few enough greasy odors except upon the weekly occasion of Monday’s boiled dinner; and, whatever the status of liver and dried peaches, canned corn and round steak, her menus remained static—­so static that in the gas-lighted basement dining-room and at a remote end of the long, well-surrounded table Mrs. Katz, with her napkin tucked well under her third chin, turned sotto from the protruding husband at her right to her left neighbor, shielding her remark with her hand.

“Am I right, Mrs. Finshriber?  I just said to my husband in the five years we been here she should just give us once a change from Friday-night lamb and noodles.”

“Say, you should complain yet!  With me it’s six and a half years day after to-morrow, Easter Day, since I asked myself that question first.”

“Even my Irving says to me to-night up in the room; jumping up and down on the hearth like he had four legs—­”

“I heard him, Mrs. Katz, on my ceiling like he had eight legs.”

“‘Mamma,’ he says, ’guess why I feel like saying “Baa."’”

“Saying what?”

“Sheep talk, Mrs. Finshriber.  B-a-a, like a sheep goes.”

“Oh!”

“‘Cause I got so many Friday nights’ lamb in me, mamma,’ he said.  Quick like a flash that child is.”

Mrs. Finshriber dipped her head and her glance, all her drooping features pulled even farther down at their corners.  “I ain’t the one to complain, Mrs. Katz, and I always say, when you come right down to it maybe Mrs. Kaufman’s house is as good as the next one, but—­”

“I wish, though, Mrs. Finshriber, you would hear what Mrs. Spritz says at her boarding-house they get for breakfast:  fried—­”

“You can imagine, Mrs. Katz, since my poor husband’s death, how much appetite I got left; but I say, Mrs. Katz, just for the principle of the thing, it would not hurt once if Mrs. Kaufman could give somebody else besides her own daughter and Vetsburg the white meat from everything, wouldn’t it?”

“It’s a shame before the boarders!  She knows, Mrs. Pinshriber, how my husband likes breast from the chicken.  You think once he gets it?  No.  I always tell him, not ’til chickens come doublebreasted like overcoats can he get it in this house, with Vetsburg such a star boarder.”

“Last night’s chicken, let me tell you, I don’t wish it to a dog!  Such a piece of dark meat with gizzard I had to swallow.”

Mrs. Katz adjusted with greater security the expanse of white napkin across her ample bosom.  Gold rings and a quarter-inch marriage band flashed in and out among the litter of small tub-shaped dishes surrounding her, and a pouncing fork of short, sure stab.  “Right away my husband gets mad when I say the same thing.  ‘When we don’t like it we should move,’ he says.”