A white flash of something that was almost fear seemed to strike Mrs. Samstag into a rigid pallor.

“No!  No!  I’m not like most mothers, Louis, for marrying their daughters off.  I want her with me.  If marrying her off is your idea, it’s best you know it now in the beginning.  I want my little girl with me—­I have to have my little girl with me!”

He was so deeply moved that his eyes were embarrassingly moist.

“Why, Carrie, every time you open your mouth you only prove to me further what a grand little woman you are!”

“You’ll like Alma, when you get to know her, Louis.”

“Why, I do now!  Always have said she’s a sweet little thing.”

“She is quiet and hard to get acquainted with at first, but that is reserve.  She’s not forward like most young girls nowadays.  She’s the kind of a child that would rather go upstairs evenings with a book or her sewing than sit down here in the lobby.  That’s where she is now.”

“Give me that kind every time in preference to all these gay young chickens that know more they oughtn’t to know about life before they start than my little mother did when she finished.”

“But do you think that girl will go to bed before I come up?  Not a bit of it.  She’s been my comforter and my salvation in my troubles.  More like the mother, I sometimes tell her, and me the child.  If you want me, Louis, it’s got to be with her, too.  I couldn’t give up my baby—­not my baby.”

“Why, Carrie, have your baby to your heart’s content!  She’s got to be a fine girl to have you for a mother, and now it will be my duty to please her as a father.  Carrie, will you have me?”

“Oh, Louis—­Loo!”

“Carrie, my dear!”

And so it was that Carrie Samstag and Louis Latz came into their betrothal.

* * * * *

None the less, it was with some misgivings and red lights burning high on her cheek bones that Mrs. Samstag at just after ten that evening turned the knob of the door that entered into her little sitting room.

The usual horrific hotel room of tight green-plush upholstery, ornamental portieres on brass rings that grated, and the equidistant French engravings of lavish scrollwork and scroll frames.

But in this case a room redeemed by an upright piano with a green-silk-and-gold-lace-shaded floor lamp glowing by.  Two gilt-framed photographs and a cluster of ivory knickknacks on the white mantel.  A heap of handmade cushions.  Art editions of the gift poets and some circulating-library novels.  A fireside chair, privately owned and drawn up, ironically enough, beside the gilded radiator, its headrest worn from kindly service to Mrs. Samstag’s neuralgic brow.

From the nest of cushions in the circle of lamp glow Alma sprang up at her mother’s entrance.  Sure enough, she had been reading, and her cheek was a little flushed and crumpled from where it had been resting in the palm of her hand.