“Yes—­Loo.”

“But you saw that mink coat.  Well, my little mother, three years before she died, was wearing one like that in sable.  Real Russian.  Set me back eighteen thousand, wholesale, and she never knew different than that it cost eighteen hundred.  Proudest moment of my life when I helped my little old mother into her own automobile in that sable coat.

“I had some friends lived in the Grenoble Apartments when you did—­the Adelbergs.  They used to tell me how it hung right down to her heels and she never got into the auto that she didn’t pick it up so as not to sit on it.

“That there coat is packed away in cold storage now, Carrie, waiting, without me exactly knowing why, I guess, for—­the one little woman in the world besides her I would let so much as touch its hem.”

Mrs. Samstag’s lips parted, her teeth showing through like light.

“Oh,” she said, “sable!  That’s my fur, Loo.  I’ve never owned any, but ask Alma if I don’t stop to look at it in every show window.  Sable!”

“Carrie—­would you—­could you—­I’m not what you would call a youngster in years, I guess, but forty-four isn’t—­”

“I’m—­forty-one, Louis.  A man like you could have younger.”

“No.  That’s what I don’t want.  In my lonesomeness, after my mother’s death, I thought once that maybe a young girl from the West, nice girl with her mother from Ohio—­but I—­funny thing, now I come to think about it—­I never once mentioned my little mother’s sable coat to her.  I couldn’t have satisfied a young girl like that, or her me, Carrie, any more than I could satisfy Alma.  It was one of those mamma-made matches that we got into because we couldn’t help it and out of it before it was too late.  No, no, Carrie, what I want is a woman as near as possible to my own age.”

“Loo, I—­I couldn’t start in with you even with the one little lie that gives every woman a right to be a liar.  I’m forty-three, Louis—­nearer to forty-four.  You’re not mad, Loo?”

“God love it!  If that ain’t a little woman for you!  Mad?  Why, just your doing that little thing with me raises your stock fifty per cent.”

“I’m—­that way.”

“We’re a lot alike, Carrie.  For five years I’ve been living in this hotel because it’s the best I can do under the circumstances.  But at heart I’m a home man, Carrie, and unless I’m pretty much off my guess, you are, too—­I mean a home woman.  Right?”

“Me all over, Loo.  Ask Alma if—­”

“I’ve got the means, too, Carrie, to give a woman a home to be proud of.”

“Just for fun, ask Alma, Loo, if one year since her father’s death I haven’t said, ‘Alma, I wish I had the heart to go back housekeeping.’”

“I knew it!”

“But I ask you, Louis, what’s been the incentive?  Without a man in the house I wouldn’t have the same interest.  That first winter after my husband died I didn’t even have the heart to take the summer covers off the furniture.  Alma was a child then, too, so I kept asking myself, ’For what should I take an interest?’ You can believe me or not, but half the time with just me to eat it, I wouldn’t bother with more than a cold snack for supper, and everyone knew what a table we used to set.  But with no one to come home evenings expecting a hot meal—­”