Into Mrs. Meyerburg’s room of many periods, its vastness so emphasized by the ceiling after Paolo Veronese, its fluted yellow-silk bed canopy reaching up to that ceiling stately and theatric enough to shade the sleep of a shah, limped Mrs. Fischlowitz timidly and with the uncertainty with which the callous feet of the unsocialistic poor tread velvet.

“How-do, Mrs. Fischlowitz?”

“Mrs. Meyerburg, I didn’t want you to be disturbed except I want to explain to you why I’m late again this month.”

“Sit down!  I don’t want you should even explain, Mrs. Fischlowitz—­that’s how little I thought about it.”

Mrs. Meyerburg was full of small, pleased ways, drawing off her guest’s decent black cape, pulling at her five-fingered mittens, lifting the nest-like bonnet.

“So!  And how’s the foot?”

“Not so good and not so bad.  And how is the sciatica with you, Mrs. Meyerburg?”

“Like with you, Mrs. Fischlowitz.  It could be better and it could be worse.  Sometimes I got a little touch yet up between my ribs.”

“If it ain’t one thing, Mrs. Meyerburg, it’s another.  What you think why I’m late again with the rent, Mrs. Meyerburg?  If last week my Sollie didn’t fall off the delivery-wagon and sprain his back!”

“You don’t say so!”

“That same job as you got him two years ago so good he’s kept, and now such a thing has to happen. Gott sei dank, he’s up and out again, but I tell you it was a scare!”

“I should say so.  And how is Tillie?”

“Mrs. Meyerburg, you should just see for yourself how that girl has got new color since that certified milk you send her every day.  Like a new girl so pretty all of a sudden she has grown.  For to-morrow, Mrs. Meyerburg, a girl what never before had a beau in her life, if Morris Rinabauer, the young foreman where she works, ’ain’t invited her out for New-Year’s Day.”

“You got great times down by Rivington Street this time of year.  Not?  I remember how my children used to like it with their horns oser like it was their own holiday.”

“Ja, it’s a great gedinks like always.  Sometimes I say it gets so tough down there I hate my Tillie should come home from the factory after dark, but now with Morris Rinabauer—­”

“Mrs. Fischlowitz, I guess you think it’s a sin I should say so, but I tell you, when I think of that dirty little street down there and your flat what I lived in the seventeen happiest years of my life with my husband and babies—­when I think back on my years in that little flat I—­I can just feel myself tremble like all over.  That’s how happy we were down there, Mrs. Fischlowitz.”

“I can tell you, Mrs. Meyerburg, when I got a place like this, at Rivington Street I wouldn’t want I should ever have to look again.”

“It’s a feeling, Mrs. Fischlowitz, what you—­you can’t understand until—­until you live through so much like me.  I—­I just want some day you should let me come down, Mrs. Fischlowitz, and visit by you in the old place, eh?”