“I always say the day what Meyer Vetsburg, when he was only a clerk in the firm, answered my furnished-room advertisement was the luckiest day in my life.”

“You ought to heard, ma.  I was teasing him the other day, telling him that he ought to live at the Savoy, now that he’s a two-thirds member of the firm.”

“Ruby!”

“I was only teasing, ma.  You just ought to seen his face.  Any day he’d leave us!”

Mrs. Kaufman placed a warm, insinuating arm around her daughter’s slim waist, drawing her around the chair-side and to her.  “There’s only one way, baby, Meyer Vetsburg can ever leave me and make me happy when he leaves.”

“Ma, what you mean?”

“You know, baby, without mama coming right out in words.”

“Ma, honest I don’t.  What?”

“You see it coming just like I do.  Don’t fool mama, baby.”

The slender lines of Miss Kaufman’s waist stiffened, and she half slipped from the embrace.

“Now, now, baby, is it wrong a mother should talk to her own baby about what is closest in both their hearts?”

“I—­I—­mama, I—­I don’t know!”

“How he’s here in this room every night lately, Ruby, since you—­you’re a young lady.  How right away he follows us up-stairs.  How lately he invited you every month down at Atlantic City.  Baby, you ain’t blind, are you?”

“Why, mama—­why, mama, what is Meyer Vetsburg to—­to me?  Why, he—­he’s got gray hair, ma; he—­he’s getting bald.  Why, he—­he don’t know I’m on earth.  He—­he’s—­”

“You mean, baby, he don’t know anybody else is on earth.  What’s, nowadays, baby, a man forty?  Why—­why, ain’t mama forty-one, baby, and didn’t you just say yourself for sisters they take us?”

“I know, ma, but he—­he—.  Why, he’s got an accent, ma, just like old man Katz and—­and all of ’em.  He says ‘too-sand’ for thousand.  He—­”

“Baby, ain’t you ashamed like it makes any difference how a good man talks?” She reached out, drawing her daughter by the wrists down into her lap.  “You’re a bad little flirt, baby, what pretends she don’t know what a blind man can see.”

Miss Kaufman’s eyes widened, darkened, and she tugged for the freedom of her wrists.  “Ma, quit scaring me!”

“Scaring you!  That such a rising man like Vetsburg, with a business he worked himself into president from clerk, looks every day more like he’s falling in love with you, should scare you!”

“Ma, not—­not him!”

In reply she fell to stroking the smooth black plaits, wound coronet fashion about Miss Kaufman’s small head.  Large, hot tears sprang to her eyes.  “Baby, when you talk like that it’s you that scares mama!”

“He—­he—­”

“Why, you think, Ruby, I been making out of myself a servant like you call it all these years except for your future?  For myself a smaller house without such a show and maybe five or six roomers without meals, you think ain’t easier as this big barn?  For what, baby, you think I always want you should have extravagances maybe I can’t afford and should keep up with the fine girls what you meet down by Atlantic City if it ain’t that a man like Meyer Vetsburg can be proud to choose you from the best?”