“Yes, dearie.”

“I told Mrs. Katz to-day right out her Irving can’t bring any more his bicycle through my front hall.  Wasn’t I right?”

“Of course you were, ma.”

“Miss Flora looked right nice in that pink waist to-night—­not?  Four-eighty-nine only, at Gimp’s sale.”

“She’s too fat for pink.”

“You get in bed first, baby, and let mama turn out the lights.”

“No, no, mama; you.”

In her white slip of a nightdress, her coronet braids unwound and falling down each shoulder, even her slightness had waned.  She was like Juliet who at fourteen had eyes of maid and martyr.

They crept into bed, grateful for darkness.

The flute had died out, leaving a silence that was plaintive.

“You all right, baby?”

“Yes, ma.”  And she snuggled down into the curve of her mother’s arm.  “Are you, mommy?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Go to sleep, then.”

“Good night, baby.”

“Good night, mommy.”

Silence.

Lying there, with her face upturned and her eyes closed, a stream of quiet tears found their way from under Miss Kaufman’s closed lids, running down and toward her ears like spectacle frames.

An hour ticked past, and two damp pools had formed on her pillow.

“Asleep yet, baby?”

“Almost, ma.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“You—­you ain’t mad at mama?”

“’Course not, dearie.”

“I—­thought it sounded like you was crying.”

“Why, mommy, ’course not!  Turn over now and go to sleep.”

Another hour, and suddenly Mrs. Kaufman shot out her arm from the coverlet, jerking back the sheet and feeling for her daughter’s dewy, upturned face where the tears were slashing down it.

“Baby!”

“Mommy, you—­you mustn’t!”

“Oh, my darling, like I didn’t suspicion it!”

“It’s only—­”

“You got, Ruby, the meanest mama in the world.  But you think, darling, I got one minute’s happiness like this?”

“I’m all right, mommy, only—­”

“I been laying here half the night, Ruby, thinking how I’m a bad mother what thinks only of her own—­”

“No, no, mommy.  Turn over and go to sl—­”

“My daughter falls in love with a fine, upright young man like Leo Markovitch, and I ain’t satisfied yet!  Suppose maybe for two or three years you ain’t so much on your feet.  Suppose even his uncle Meyer don’t take him in.  Don’t any young man got to get his start slow?”

“Mommy!”

“Because I got for her my own ideas, my daughter shouldn’t have in life the man she wants!”

“But, mommy, if—­”

“You think for one minute, Ruby, after all these years without this house on my hands and my boarders and their kicks, a woman like me would be satisfied?  Why, the more, baby, I think of such a thing, the more I see it for myself!  What you think, Ruby, I do all day without steps to run, and my gedinks with housekeeping and marketing after eighteen years of it?  At first, Ruby, ain’t it natural it should come like a shock that you and that rascal Leo got all of a sudden so—­so thick?  I—­It ain’t no more, baby.  I—­I feel fine about it.”