“Such a beau-ti-ful girl!  I can tell you for her a prince ain’t good enough.  Ach, what a pleasure it must be, Mrs. Meyerburg, for a mother to know if her child wants heaven she can nearly get it for her.  I can tell you that must be the greatest pleasure of all for you, Mrs. Meyerburg, to give to your daughter everything just like she wants it.”

“Ja, ja,” said with little to indicate mental ferment.

They were in the Park, with the wind scampering through the skeins of bare tree branches.  The lake lay locked in ice, skaters in the ecstasy of motion lunging across it.  Beneath the mink lap-robe Mrs. Fischlowitz snuggled deeper and more lax.

“Gott in Himmel, I tell you this is better as standing over my cheese Kuchen.”

“Always I used to let my cheese drip first the night before.  Right through a cheese-cloth sack hung from a nail what my husband drove in for me under the window-sill.”

“Right that same nail is there yet, Mrs. Meyerburg. Oser we should touch one thing!”

“I can tell you it’s a great comfort, Mrs. Fischlowitz, I got such a tenant as you in there.”

“When you come to visit me, Mrs. Meyerburg, right to the last nail like you left it you find it.  Not even from the kitchen would I let my Sollie take down the old clothes-line what you had stretched across one end.”

“Ach, how many times in rainy days I used that line.  It’s a good little line I bet yet.  Not?”

“Ja.”  But with no corresponding kit of emotions in Mrs. Fischlowitz’s voice.  She was still breathing deep the buoyant ether of the moment, and beneath the ingratiating warmth of fur utterly soothed. “Gott,” she said, “I wish my sister-in-law, Hanna, with all her fine airs up where she lives on One Hundred and Twenty-ninth Street, could see me now. Oser she could stare and stare, and bow and bow, and past her I would roll like—­like a rolling-pin.”

From the gold-topped bottle nearest her came a long insidious whiff of frangipani.  She dared to lean toward it, sniffing.

“Such a beautiful smell.”  And let her eyes half close.

“You market your meat yet on Fridays down by old Lavinsky’s, Mrs. Fischlowitz?”

“Ja, just like always, only his liver ain’t so good like it used to be.  I can tell you that’s a beau-ti-ful smell.”

An hour they rode purringly over smooth highways and for a moment alongside the river, but there the wind was edged with ice and they were very presently back into the leisurely flow of the Avenue.  From her curves Mrs. Fischlowitz unbent herself slowly.

“No, no, Mrs. Fischlowitz—­you stay in.”

“Ach, I get out here at your house, too, and take the street-cars.  I—­”

“No, no.  James takes you all the way home, Mrs. Fischlowitz.  I get out because my Becky likes I should get home early and get dressed up for dinner.”

“But Mrs. Meyerburg—­”