“Ruby, you don’t eat enough to keep a bird alive.  Ain’t it a shame, Mr. Vetsburg, a girl should be so dainty?”

Mr. Meyer Vetsburg cast a beetling glance down upon Miss Kaufman, there so small beside him, and tinked peremptorily against her plate three times with his fork.  “Eat, young lady, like your mama wants you should, or, by golly!  I’ll string you up for my watch-fob—­not, Mrs. Kaufman?”

A smile lay under Mr. Vetsburg’s gray-and-black mustache.  Gray were his eyes, too, and his suit, a comfortable baggy suit with the slouch of the wearer impressed into it, the coat hiking center back, the pocket-flaps half in, half out, and the knees sagging out of press.

“That’s right, Mr. Vetsburg, you should scold her when she don’t eat.”

Above the black-bombazine basque, so pleasantly relieved at the throat by a V of fresh white net, a wave of color moved up Mrs. Kaufman’s face into her architectural coiffure, the very black and very coarse skein of her hair wound into a large loose mound directly atop her head and pierced there with a ball-topped comb of another decade.

“I always say, Mr. Vetsburg, she minds you before she minds anybody else in the world.”

“Ma,” said Miss Kaufman, close upon that remark, “some succotash, please.”

From her vantage down-table, Mrs. Katz leaned a bit forward from the line.

“Look, Mrs. Finshriber, how for a woman her age she snaps her black eyes at him.  It ain’t hard to guess when a woman’s got a marriageable daughter—­not?”

“You can take it from me she’ll get him for her Ruby yet!  And take it from me, too, almost any girl I know, much less Ruby Kaufman, could do worse as get Meyer Vetsburg.”

“S-say, I wish it to her to get him.  For why once in a while shouldn’t a poor girl get a rich man except in books and choruses?”

“Believe me, a girl like Ruby can manage what she wants.  Take it from me, she’s got it behind her ears.”

“I should say so.”

“Without it she couldn’t get in with such a crowd of rich girls like she does.  I got it from Mrs. Abrams in the Arline Apartments how every week she plays five hundred with Nathan Shapiro’s daughter.”

“No!  Shapiro & Stein?”

“And yesterday at matinee in she comes with a box of candy and laughing with that Rifkin girl!  How she gets in with such swell girls, I don’t know, but there ain’t a nice Saturday afternoon I don’t see that girl walking on Fifth Avenue with just such a crowd of fine-dressed girls, all with their noses powdered so white and their hats so little and stylish.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if her mother don’t send her down to Atlantic City over Easter again if Vetsburg goes.  Every holiday she has to go lately like it was coming to her.”

“Say, between you and me, I don’t put it past her it’s that Markovitch boy down there she’s after.  Ray Klein saw ’em on the boardwalk once together, and she says it’s a shame for the people how they sat so close in a rolling-chair.”