“No, no, Max, I didn’t mean it.  You—­you just got me so crazy I don’t know what I’m saying.  Sure, I—­I made you take it off me.  I wanted ’em to cut it off me to graft on your burns because it—­it was like finding a new way of saying how—­how I love you, Max.  Every drop of blood was like—­like I could see for myself how—­how I loved you, Max.  I—­”

“Oh, my God!” he said, folded his arms atop the piano, and let his head fall into them.  “Oh, my God!”

“That’s how I love you, Max.  That’s how you—­you’re all in the world I got, Max.  That’s why I—­can’t, just can’t let you go, dear.  Don’t throw me over, Max.  Cut the comedy and come down to earth.  You ’ain’t had a holy spell for two years now since the old woman sniffed me and wanted to marry you off to that cloak-and-suit buyer with ten thou in the bank and a rush of teeth to the front.  You remember how we laffed, dearie, that night we seen her at the show?  Don’t let your old lady—­”

“Cut that, I tell you!”

“You’d be a swell gink hitting the altar trail with a bunch of white satin, wouldn’t you?  At your time of life, forty and set in your ways, you’d have a swell time landing a young frisky one and trying to learn one of them mother’s darlings how to rub in your hair-tonic and how to rub your salad-plate with garlic?  Gosh-golly!  I bust right out laffing when I even think about it!  Come down to earth, Max!  You’d be a swell hit welded for life with a gold band, now, wouldn’t you?”

She was suddenly seized with immoderate laughter not untinctured with hysteria, loud and full of emptiness, as if she were shouting for echoes in a cave.

“Like hell you would! You tied to a bunch of satin and tending the kids with the whooping-cough!  Whoops la, la!” She fell to rocking herself backward and forward, her rollicking laughter staining her face dark red.

“Whoops la, la!  Whoops la, la!”

Suddenly Max Zincas rose to his height, regarding her sprawling uncontrolled pose with writhing lips of distaste, straightened his waistcoat, cleared his throat twice, and, standing, drank the last of his wine.  But a pallor crept up, riding down the flush.

“Funny, ain’t it?  Laff!  Laff!  But I’d wait till you hear something funnier I got to tell you.  Funny, ain’t it?  Laff!  Laff!”

She looked up with her lips still sagging from merriment, but the dark red in her face darker.

“Huh?”

His bravado suddenly oozed and the clock ticked roundly into the silence between them.

“Huh?” she repeated, cocking her head.

“You got to know it, Mae, and the sooner I get it out of me the better.  But, remember, if you wanna drive me out before I’m finished, if you wanna get rid of me a damn sight quicker than any other way, throw me some sob stuff and watch.  You—­Well—­I—­The sooner I get it out of me the better, Mae.”

“Huh?”

“She’s a—­a nice little thing, Mae.  Her mother’s a crony with my old lady.  Lives in a brownstone out on Lenox Avenue.  Met her first at—­at a tennis-match she was winning at—­at Forest Park Club.”