A sudden vibration darted through Mrs. Binswanger’s body, straightening it.  “Always me!  I tell you, Simon, with your family you ’ain’t got no troubles.  I got ’em all.  How he sits there behind his newspaper just like a boarder and not in the family!  I tell you more as once in my life I have wished there was never a newspaper printed.  Right under his nose he sits with one glued every evening.”

“Na, na, old lady!”

“That sweet talk don’t make no neverminds with me.  ‘Na, na,’ he says.  I tell you even when my children was babies how they could cry every night right under his nose and never a hand would that man raise to help me.  I tell you my husband’s a grand help to me.  ‘Such a grand husband,’ the ladies always say to me I got.  I wish they should know what I know!”

Mr. Binswanger tossed aside his newspaper and raised his spectacles to his horseshoe expanse of bald head.  His face radiated into a smile that brought out the whole chirography of fine lines, and his eyes disappeared in laughter like two raisins poked into dough.

“Na, na, old lady, na, na!” He made to pinch her cheek where it bagged toward a soft scallop of double chin, but she withdrew querulously.

“I tell you what I been through this winter, with Izzy out in a Middle West territory where only once in four months I can see him, and my Ray and her going-ons with them little snips, and now Miriam with her Europe on the brain.  I tell you that if anybody in this family needs Europe it’s me for my health, better as Miriam for her singing and her style.  Such nagging I have got ringing in my ears about it I think it’s easier to go as to stay home with long faces.”

Erect on the edge of her chair Miriam inclined toward her parent.  “That’s just what I been saying, mamma; all four of us need it.  Not only me and Ray, but—­”

“Leave me out, missy!”

“Not only us two for our education, mamma, but a trip like that can make you and papa ten years younger.  Read what the booklet says.  It—­”

“I’m an old woman and I don’t want I should try to look young like on the streets here up-town you can see the women.  What comes natural to me like gray hairs I don’t got to try to hide.”

“Hurrah for ma!  ‘Down with the peroxide and the straight fronts,’ she says.”

“Izzy, that ain’t so nice neither to talk such things before your sisters.”

“Don’t listen to him, mamma.  Just let me ask you, mamma, just let me ask you, papa—­papa, listen:  did you ever in your life have a real vacation?  What were those two weeks in Arverne for you last summer compared to on board a ship?  You—­”

“That’s what I need yet—­shipboard!  I tell you I’m an old man and I’m glad that I got a home where I can take off my shoes and sit in comfort with my rheumatism.”

“Hannah Levin’s father limped ten times worse than you, papa.  Didn’t he, mamma?  And since he took Hannah over last summer not one stroke has he had since.  And she—­Well, you see what she did for herself.”