“You little imp, I’ll—­”

“Children!  Stop it, do you hear!  Ray, go right this minute and call Miriam and bring me my glasses.  Izzy, do you think it’s so nice that a grown man should tease his little sister?”

“I’ll be glad when he goes out on his Western trip next week.”

“Skidoo, you little imp!”

She tossed her head in high-spirited distemper and flounced through the doorway.  He rose from his mound of pillows, jerking his daring waistcoat into place, flinging each knee outward to adjust the knifelike trouser creases, swept backward a black, pomaded forelock and straightened an accurate and vivid cravat.

“She’s getting too fresh, I tell you, ma.  If I catch her up round the White Front drug-store with that fresh crowd of kids I’ll slap her face right there before them.”

“Ach, at her age, Izzy, Miriam was just the same way, and now look how fine a boy has got to be before that girl will look at him.  Too fine, I say!”

“Where’s my hat, ma?  I laid it here on the sewing-machine.  Gee! the only way for a fellow to keep his hat round this joint is to sit on it!”

A quick frown sprang between Mrs. Binswanger’s eyes and she glanced at her husband, hidden behind his barricade of newspaper.  Her brow knotted and her wide, uncorseted figure half rose toward him.

“Izzy, one night can’t you stay at home and—­”

“I ain’t gone yet, am I, ma?  Don’t holler before you’re hurt.  There’s a fellow going to call for me at eight and we’re going to a show—­a good fellow for me to know, Irving Shapiro, city salesman for the Empire Waist Company.  I ain’t still in bibs, ma, that I got to be bossed where I go nights.”

“Ach, Izzy, for why can’t you stay home this evening?  Stay home and you and Miriam and your friend sing songs together, and later I fix for you some sandwiches—­not, Izzy?  A young man like Irving Shapiro I bet likes it if you stay home with him once.  Nice it will be for your sister, too—­eh, Izzy?”

Mrs. Binswanger’s face, slightly sagging at the mouth from the ravages of two recently extracted molars, broke into an invitational smile.

“Eh, Izzy?”

He found and withdrew his hat from behind a newspaper-rack and cast a quick glance toward the form of his father, whose nether half, ending in a pair of carpet slippers dangling free from his balbriggan heels, protruded from the barricade of newspaper.

“That’s right, just get the old man started on me, ma, too.  When a fellow travels six months out of the year in every two-by-four burg in the Middle West, nagging like this is just what he needs when he gets home.”

“You know, Izzy, I’m the last one to start something.”

“Then don’t always ask a fellow where he’s going, ma, and get pa started too.”

“You know that not one thing that goes on does papa hear when he reads his paper, Izzy.  Never one word do I say to him how I feel when you go, only I—­I don’t like you should run out nights so late, Izzy.  Next week again already you go out on your trip and—­”