“Come on, Phonzie.”

“Coming, madam.”

In the up-town Subway, bound for the up-town flat, he leaned to her with his small blond mustache raised in a smile.

“Where’s the book, madam?”

“Forgot it,” she replied, without shame.

* * * * *

Out of three hundred and eighty dollars cash, a bit of black and gold brocade flung adroitly over the imitation hearth, a cot masquerading under a Mexican afghan of many colors, a canary in a cage, a potted geranium, a shallow chair with a threadbare head-rest, a lamp, a rug, a two-burner gas-stove, Madam Moores had evolved Home.

And why not?  The Petit Trianon was built that a queen might there find rest from marble halls.  The Borghese women in their palaces live behind drawn shades, but Italian peasants sit in their low doorways and sing as they rock and suckle.

In Madam Moores’s two-flights-up flat the windows were flung open to the moist air of spring, which flowed in cool as water between crisp muslin curtains, stirring them.  In the sudden flare of electric light the canary unfolded its head from a sheaf of wing, cheeped, and fell to picking up seed from the bottom of its cage.

Mr. Alphonse Michelson collapsed into the shallow chair beside the table and relaxed his head against the threadbare dent in the upholstery.

“Whoops! home never was like this!”

“Is him tired?”

“Dead.”

“Smoke?”

“Yep.”

“There.”

“Ah!”

“Now him all comfy and I go fix poor tired bad boy him din-din.”

More native than mother-tongue is Mother’s tongue.  Whom women love they would first destroy with gibberish.  To Mr. Michelson’s linguistic credit, however, he shifted in his chair in unease.

“What did you say?”

“What him want for din-din?”

He slung one slim leg atop the other, slumping deeper to the luxury of his chair.  “Dinner?”

“Yes, din-din.”

“Say, those were swell chicken livers smothered in onions you served the other night, madam.  Believe me, those were some livers!”

No, reader, Romance is not dead.  On the contrary, he has survived the frock-coat and learned to chew a clove.

A radiance as soft as the glow from a pink-shaded lamp flowed over Madam Moores’s face.

“Livers him going to have and biscuits made in my own ittsie bittsie oven.  Eh?”

“Swell.”

She divested herself of her wraps, fluffing her mahogany-colored hair where the hat had restricted it, lighted a tiny stove off in the tiny kitchenette and enveloped herself in a blue-bib-top apron.  Her movements were short and full of caprice, and when she set the table, brushing his chair as she passed and repassed, lights came out in her eyes when she dared raise her lids to show them.

They dined by the concealed fireplace and from off a table that could fold its legs under like Aladdin’s.  Fumes of well-made coffee rose as ingratiating as the perfume of a love story.  Mr. Michelson dropped a lump of butter into the fluffy heart of a biscuit and clapped the halves together.