“Mamma, the way you pick on that boy!”

Mrs. Shongut folded both hands atop her broom in a solemn and hieratic gesture; her face was full of lines, as though time had autographed it many times over in a fine hand.

“Can you blame me?  Can you blame me that I worry about that boy, with his wild ways?  That a boy like him should gamble away every cent of his salary, except when he wins a little and buys us such nonsenses as bracelets!  That a boy who learnt bookkeeping in an expensive business school, and knows that with his papa business ain’t so good, shouldn’t offer to pay out of his salary a little board!  I tell you, Renie, as he goes now, it can’t lead to no good; sometimes I would do almost anything to get him out West.  Not a cent does he offer to—­”

“He only makes—­”

“You know, Renie, how little I want his money; but that he shouldn’t offer to help out at home a little—­that every cent on cards and clothes he should spend!  I ask you, is it any reason him and his papa got scenes together until for the neighbors I’m ashamed, and for papa’s heart so afraid?  That a fine boy like our Izzy should run so wild!”

Tears lay close to the surface of her voice, and she created a sudden flurry of dust, sweeping with short, swift strokes.

“Izzy’s not so worse!  Give me a boy like Izzy any time, to a mollycoddle.  He’s just throwing off steam now.”

“Just take up with your wild brother against your old parents!  Your papa’s a young man, with no heart trouble and lots of money; he can afford to have a card-playing son what has to have second breakfast alone every morning!  Just you side with your brother!”

Miss Shongut side-stepped the furniture, which in the panicky confusion of sweeping was huddled toward the center of the room, and through a cloud of dust to the door.

“Every time I open my mouth in this family I put my foot in it.  I should worry about what isn’t my business!”

“Well, one thing I can say, me and papa never need to reproach ourselves that we ’ain’t done the right thing by our children.”

“Clean sheets, mamma?”

“Yes; and don’t muss up the linen-shelfs.”

Her daughter flitted down a narrow aisle of hallway; from the shoulders her thin, flowing sleeves floated backward, filmy, white.

Mrs. Shongut flung open the screen door and swept a pile of webby dust to the porch and then off on the patch of grass.

Thin spring sunshine lay warm along the neat terraces of Wasserman Avenue.  Windows were flung wide to the fresh kiss of spring; pillows, comforters, and rugs draped across their sills.  Across the street a negro, with an old gunny-sack tied apron-fashion about his loins, turned a garden hose on a stretch of asphalt and swept away the flood with his broom.  A woman, whose hair caught the sunlight like copper, avoided the flood and tilted a perambulator on its two rear wheels down the wooden steps of her veranda.