For the life of him, all he could find to convey to her the bleeding quality of his sympathy was, “Poor, poor little woman!”

“Heigh-ho!” she said, and again, “Heigh-ho!”

There was quite a nape to her neck.  He could see it where the carefully trimmed brown hair left it for a rise to skillful coiffure, and what threatened to be a slight depth of flesh across the shoulders had been carefully massaged of this tendency, fifteen minutes each night and morning, by her daughter.

In fact, through the black transparency of her waist Mr. Latz thought her plumply adorable.

It was about the eyes that Mrs. Samstag showed most plainly whatever inroads into her clay the years might have gained.  There were little dark areas beneath them like smeared charcoal, and two unrelenting sacs that threatened to become pouchy.

Their effect was not so much one of years, but they gave Mrs. Samstag, in spite of the only slightly plump and really passable figure, the look of one out of health.  Women of her kind of sallowness can be found daily in fashionable physicians’ outer offices, awaiting X-ray appointments.

What ailed Mrs. Samstag was hardly organic.  She was the victim of periodic and raging neuralgic fires that could sweep the right side of her head and down into her shoulder blade with a great crackling and blazing of nerves.  It was not unusual for her daughter Alma to sit up the one or two nights that it could endure, unfailing through the wee hours in her chain of hot applications.

For a week, sometimes, these attacks heralded their comings with little jabs, like the pricks of an exploring needle.  Then the under-eyes began to look their muddiest.  They were darkening now and she put up two fingers with a little pressing movement to her temple.

“You’re a great little woman,” reiterated Mr. Latz, rather riveting even Mrs. Samstag’s suspicion that here was no great stickler for variety of expression.

“I try to be,” she said, his tone inviting out in her a mood of sweet forbearance.

“And a great sufferer, too,” he said, noting the pressing fingers.

She colored under this delightful impeachment.

“I wouldn’t wish one of my neuralgia spells to my worst enemy, Mr. Latz.”

“If you were mine—­I mean—­if—­the—­say—­was mine—­I wouldn’t stop until I had you to every specialist in Europe.  I know a thing or two about those fellows over there.  Some of them are wonders.”

Mrs. Samstag looked off, her profile inclined to lift and fall as if by little pulleys of emotion.

“That’s easier said than done, Mr. Latz, by a—­widow who wants to do right by her grown daughter and living so—­high since the war.”

“I—­I—­” said Mr. Latz, leaping impulsively forward on the chair that was as tightly upholstered in effect as he in his modish suit, then clutching himself there as if he had caught the impulse on the fly, “I just wish I could help.”