“Ach, Mrs. Meyerburg, I can tell you the day what you visit on me down there I am a proud woman.  How little we got to offer you know, but if I could fix for you Kaffeeklatsch some day and Kuchen and—­”

“In the kitchen you still got the noodle-board yet, Mrs. Fischlowitz, where you can mix Kuchen too?”

“I should say so.  Always on it I mix my doughs.”

“He built it in for me himself, Mrs. Fischlowitz.  On hinges so when I was done, up against the wall out of the way I could fold it.”

“‘Just think,’ I say to my children, ’we eat noodles off a board what Simon Meyerburg built with his own hands.’  On the whole East Side it’s a curiosity.”

“Sometimes when I come down by your flat, Mrs. Fischlowitz, I show you how I used to make them for him.  Wide ones he liked.”

“Ach, Mrs. Meyerburg, like you could put your hands in dough now!”

“‘Mamma,’ he used to say—­standing in the kitchen door when he came home nights and looking at me maybe rocking Becky there by the stove and waiting supper for him—­’Mamma,’ he’d say, clapping his hands at me, ’open your eyes wide so I can see what’s in ’em.’”

“That such a big man should play like that!”

“‘Come in, darling,’ I’d say; ‘you can’t guess from there what we got.’”

“Just think, like just married you were together.”

“‘Noodles!’ he’d holler, and all the time right in back of me, spread out on the board, he could see ’em.  I can see him yet, Mrs. Fischlowitz, standing there in the kitchen doorway, under the horseshoe what he found when we first landed.”

“I can tell you, Mrs. Meyerburg, in that flat we ’ain’t had nothing but luck, neither, with you so good to us.”

“Ach, now, Mrs. Fischlowitz, for an old friend like you, what I lived next door to so many years and more as once gave my babies to keep for me when I must go out awhile, I shouldn’t do a little yet.”

“‘Little,’ she calls it.  With such low rent you give us I’m ashamed to bring the money.  Five weeks in the country and milk for my Tillie, until it’s back from the grave you snatched her.  Even on my back now every stitch what I got on I got to thank you for.  Such comfort I got from that black cape!”

“I was just thinking, Mrs. Fischlowitz, with your rheumatism and on such a cold day a cape ain’t so good for you, neither.  Right up under it the wind can get.”

“Warm like toast it is, Mrs. Meyerburg.”

“I got a idea, Mrs. Fischlowitz!  In that chest over there by the wall I got yet a jacket from Rivington Street.  Right away it got too tight for me.  Like new it is, with a warm beaver collar.  At auction one day he got it for me.  Like a top it will fit you, Mrs. Fischlowitz.”

“No, no, please, Mrs. Meyerburg.  It just looks like every time what I come you got to give me something.  Ashamed it makes me.  Please you shouldn’t.”

But in the pleasant frenzy of sudden decision Mrs. Meyerburg was on her knees beside a carved chest, burrowing her arm beneath folded garments, the high smell of camphor exuding.