“For the price what you say he hinted to you last night he’s got to have before he can get married, I guess oser I can say if I like him or not.”

“I should think, ma, if you had any pride for the family after the way we’ve been spit on by a certain bunch in this town, you’d be glad to grab a marquis to wave in their stuck-up faces.”

“For such things what make in life men like wild beasts fighting each other I got no time.  I ain’t all for style.  All what I want is to see my little girl married to a fine, good—­”

“Yes, yes, ma.  I know all that fine, good man stuff.”

“Ja, I say it again.  To a fine, good man just like nearly all your brothers married fine, good women.”

“The marquis, just let me tell you, ma, is a man of force—­he is.  Maybe those foreigners don’t always show up, but I’ve seen him on his own ground.  I’ve seen him in Paris and Monte Carlo and I—­”

“I ’ain’t got a word to say against this young man what followed you all the way home from Paris.  What I don’t know I can’t talk about.  Only I ask you, Becky, ain’t it always in the papers how from Europe they run here thick after the girls what have got money?”

“What are you always running down Europe for, ma?  Where did you come from, yourself, I’d like to know!”

“I don’t run it down, baby.  I don’t.  You know how your papa loved the old country and sent always money back home.  But he always said, baby, it’s in America we had all our good luck and to America what gave us so much we should give back too.  Just because your brother Felix and his wife what was on the stage like such doings over there is no reason—­”

“It’s just those notions of yours, ma, that are keeping this family down, let me tell you that—­you and Ben and Roody and Izzy and all the rest of them with their old-fogyness.”

“Your brothers, let me tell you, you bad girl, you, are as fine, steady men as your papa before them.”

“We could have one of the biggest names in this town and get in on the right kind of charities, if you and they didn’t—­”

“Your papa, Becky, had his own ideas how to do charity and how we should not give just where our name shows big in the papers.  Your brothers are like him, fine, good men, and that’s why I want the Memorial should come like a surprise, so they can have before them always that their father was the finest—­”

Suddenly Miss Meyerburg flung herself back on her pillows, tears gushing hot and full of salt.  “Oh, what’s the use?  What’s the use?  She won’t understand.”

“Becky, baby, ’ain’t you got everything what money can buy?  A house on Fifth Avenue what even the sight-seeing automobile hollers out about.  Automobiles of your own more as you can use.  Brothers nearly all with grand wives and families, and such a beautiful girl like you with a grand fortune to—­”

“Mamma, mamma, can’t you understand there’s things that money can’t buy?”