“I don’t tell her nothing!” broke in Mr. Vetsburg and moved toward her with considerable strengthening of tone.  “Mrs. Kaufman, I ask you, do you think it right you should go back like this on Ruby and me, just when we want most you should—­”

At that she quickened and fluttered.  “Ruby and you!  Ach, it’s a old saying, Mr. Vetsburg, like the twig is bent so the tree grows.  That child won’t be so surprised her mother changes her mind.  Just so changeable as her mother, and more, is Ruby herself.  With that girl, Mr. Vetsburg, it’s—­it’s hard to know what she does one minute from the next.  I always say no man—­nobody can ever count on a little harum-scarum like—­like she is.”

He took up her hat, a small turban of breast feathers, laid out on the table beside him, and advanced with it clumsily enough.  “Come,” he said, “please now, Mrs. Kaufman.  Please.”

“I—­”

“I—­I got plans made for us to-morrow down by the shore that’s—­that’s just fine!  Come now, Mrs. Kaufman.”

“Please, Mr. Vetsburg, don’t force.  I—­I can’t!  I always say nobody can ever count on such a little harum-scarum as—­”

“You mean to tell me, Mrs. Kaufman, that just because a little shyster doctor—­”

Her hand closed over the long envelope again, crunching it.  “No, no, that—­that ain’t all, Mr. Vetsburg.  Only I don’t want you should tell Ruby.  You promise me?  How that child worries over little things.  Shulif from the agency called up just now.  He don’t give me one more minute as two this afternoon I—­I should sign.  How I been putting them off so many weeks with this lease it’s a shame.  Always you know how in the back of my head I’ve had it to take maybe a smaller place when this lease was done, but, like I say, talk is cheap and moving ain’t so easy done—­ain’t it?  If he puts in new plumbing in the pantry and new hinges on the doors and papers my second floor and Mrs. Suss’s alcove, like I said last night, after all I could do worse as stay here another five year—­ain’t it, Mr. Vetsburg?”

“I—­”

“A house what keeps filled so easy, and such a location, with the Subway less as two blocks.  I—­So you see, Mr. Vetsburg, if I don’t want I come back and find my house on the market, maybe rented over my head, I got to stay home for Shulif when he comes to-day.”

A rush of dark blood had surged up into Mr. Vetsburg’s face, and he twiddled his hat, his dry fingers moving around inside the brim.

“Mrs. Kaufman,” he cried—­“Mrs. Kaufman, sometimes when for years a man don’t speak out his mind, sometimes he busts all of a sudden right out.  I—­Oh—­e-e-e!” and, immediately and thickly inarticulate, made a tremendous feint at clearing his throat, tossed up his hat and caught it; rolled his eyes.

“Mr. Vetsburg?”

“A man, Mrs. Kaufman, can bust!”

“Bust?”

He was still violently dark, but swallowing with less labor.  “Yes, from holding in.  Mrs. Kaufman, should a woman like you—­the finest woman in the world, and I can prove it—­a woman, Mrs. Kaufman, who in her heart and my heart and—­Should such a woman not come to Atlantic City when I got everything fixed like a stage set!”