“Oh, mommy, if—­if I thought you did!”

“I do.  Why not?  A fine young man what my girl is in love with.  Every mother should have it so.”

“Mommy, you mean it?”

“I tell you I feel fine.  You don’t need to feel bad or cry another minute.  I can tell you I feel happy.  To-morrow at Atlantic City if such a rascal don’t tell me for himself, I—­I ask him right out!”

“Ma!”

“For why yet he should wait till he’s got better prospects, so his mother-in-law can hang on?  I guess not!”

“Mommy darling.  If you only truly feel like that about it.  Why, you can keep putting off the lease, ma, if it’s only for six months, and then we—­we’ll all be to—­”

“Of course, baby.  Mama knows.  Of course!”

“He—­I just can’t begin to tell you, ma, the kind of a fellow Leo is till you know him better, mommy dear.”

“Always Vetsburg says he’s a wide-awake one!”

“That’s just what he is, ma.  He’s just a prince if—­if there ever was one.  One little prince of a fellow.”  She fell to crying softly, easy tears that flowed freely.

“I—­I can tell you, baby, I’m happy as you.”

“Mommy dear, kiss me.”

They talked, huddled arm in arm, until dawn flowed in at the window and dirty roofs began to show against a clean sky.  Footsteps began to clatter through the asphalt court and there came the rattle of milk-cans.

“I wonder if Annie left out the note for Mrs. Suss’s extra milk!”

“Don’t get up, dearie; it’s only five—­”

“Right away, baby, with extra towels I must run up to Miss Flora’s room.  That six o’clock-train for Trenton she gets.”

“Ma dear, let me go.”

“Lay right where you are!  I guess you want you should look all worn out when a certain young man what I know walks down to meet our train at Atlantic City this afternoon, eh?”

“Oh, mommy, mommy!” And Ruby lay back against the luxury of pillows.

At eleven the morning rose to its climax—­the butcher, the baker, and every sort of maker hustling in and out the basementway; the sweeping of upstairs halls; windows flung open and lace curtains looped high; the smell of spring pouring in even from asphalt; sounds of scrubbing from various stoops; shouts of drivers from a narrow street wedged with its Saturday-morning blockade of delivery wagons, and a crosstown line of motor-cars, tops back and nosing for the speedway of upper Broadway.  A homely bouquet of odors rose from the basement kitchen, drifting up through the halls, the smell of mutton bubbling as it stewed.

After a morning of up-stairs and down-stairs and in and out of chambers, Mrs. Kaufman, enveloped in a long-sleeved apron still angular with starch, hung up the telephone receiver in the hall just beneath the staircase and entered her bedroom, sitting down rather heavily beside the open shelf of her desk.  A long envelope lay uppermost on that desk, and she took it up slowly, blinking her eyes shut and holding them squeezed tight as if she would press back a vision, even then a tear oozing through.  She blinked it back, but her mouth was wry with the taste of tears.