A slatternly maid poked her head in through the open door.  “Mrs. Katz broke ’er mug!”

“Take the one off Mr. Krakow’s wash-stand and give it to her, Tillie.”

She was crying now frankly, and when the door swung closed, even though it swung back again on its insufficient hinge, she let her head fall forward into the pillow of her arms, the curve of her back rising and falling.

But after a while the greengrocer came on his monthly mission, in his white apron and shirt-sleeves, and she compared stubs with him from a file on her desk and balanced her account with careful squinted glance and a keen eye for an overcharge on a cut of breakfast bacon.

On the very heels of him, so that they met and danced to pass each other in the doorway, Mr. Vetsburg entered, with an overcoat flung across his right arm and his left sagging to a small black traveling-bag.

“Well,” he said, standing in the frame of the open door, his derby well back on his head and regarding her there beside the small desk, “is this what you call ready at twelve?”

She rose and moved forward in her crackly starched apron.  “I—­Please, Mr. Vetsburg, it ain’t right, I know!”

“You don’t mean you’re not going!” he exclaimed, the lifted quality immediately dropping from his voice.

“You—­you got to excuse me again, Mr. Vetsburg.  It ain’t no use I should try to get away on Saturdays, much less Easter Saturday.”

“Well, of all things!”

“Right away, the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, right one things after another.”

He let his bag slip to the floor.

“Maybe, Mrs. Kaufman,” he said, “it ain’t none of my business, but ain’t it a shame a good business woman like you should let herself always be tied down to such a house like she was married to it?”

“But—­”

“Can’t get away on Saturdays, just like it ain’t the same any other day in the week, I ask you!  Saturday you blame it on yet!”

She lifted the apron from her hem, her voice hurrying.  “You can see for yourself, Mr. Vetsburg, how in my brown silk all ready I was.  Even—­even Ruby don’t know yet I don’t go.  Down by Gimp’s I sent her she should buy herself one of them red straw hats is the fad with the girls now.  She meets us down by the station.”

“That’s a fine come-off, ain’t it, to disappoint—­”

“At the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, how things can happen.  Out of a clear sky Mrs. Finshriber has to-morrow for Easter dinner that skin doctor, Abrams, and his wife she’s so particular about.  And Annie with her sore ankle and—­”

“A little shyster doctor like Abrams with his advertisements all over the newspapers should sponge off you and your holiday!  By golly!  Mrs. Kaufman, just like Ruby says, how you let a whole houseful of old hens rule this roost it’s a shame!”

“When you go down to station, Mr. Vetsburg, so right away she ain’t so disappointed I don’t come, tell her maybe to-morrow I—.”