“Go to it, pa!”

Suddenly Miss Binswanger let fall her head into her cupped hands.  Tears trickled through.  “I—­I just wish that I—­I hadn’t been born!  Why—­did you move up-town, then, where everybody does things, if—­if—­”

Her father’s reply came in a sudden avalanche.  “For why?  Because then, just like now, you nagged me.  You can take it from me, just so happy as now was me and mamma down by Rivington Street.  I’m a plain man and with no time for nonsense.  I tell you the shirtwaist business ’ain’t been so good that—­”

“You—­you can’t fool me with that poor talk, papa.  Everybody knows you get a bigger business each year.  You can’t fool me that way.”

Tears burst and flowed over her words, and her head burrowed deeper.  Across her prostrate form Simon Binswanger nodded to his wife in rising perplexity.

“Fine come-off, eh, Carrie?”

“Miriam, ach, Miriam, come here to mamma.”

“Aw, take her, pa, if she’s so crazy to go.  It’ll be slack time between now and when I get back from my territory.  Max has got pretty good run of the office these days.  Take her across, pa, and get it out of her system.  Quit your crying, kid.”

Mr. Binswanger waggled a crooked finger in close proximity to his son’s face.  “Du!  Du mit a big mouth!  Is it because you sell for the house such big bills I can afford to run me all over Europe!  A few more accounts like Einstein from Cleveland you can sell for me, and then we can go bankrupt easier as to Europe.  Du mit a big mouth!”

“Pa, ain’t you ever going to get that out of your system?  My first bad account and—­”

“You’m a dude!  That’s all I know, you’m a dude!  Right on my back now I got on your old shirts and dressed like a king I feel.”

“I’m done, pa!  I’m done!”

“Ach, Miriam, don’t cry so.  Here, look up at mamma.  Maybe, Miriam, if you ask your papa once more he will—­”

“I tell you, no.  What Mark Lillianthal does and what my son can say so easy makes nothing with me.  I’m glad as I got a home to stay in.”

Above her daughter’s bowed head Mrs. Binswanger regarded her husband through watery eyes.  “She ain’t so wrong, Simon.  I tell you I got the first time to hear you come out and say to your family, ’Well, this year we do something big.’  The bigger you get in business the littler on the outside you get, Simon.  Always you been the last to do things.”

“And, papa, everybody—­”

“Everybody makes no difference with me.  I don’t work for the steamship company.  For two thousand dollars what such a trip costs I can do better as Europe.”

“I—­I just wish I hadn’t ever been born.”

A sudden tear found its way down Mrs. Binswanger’s billowy cheek.  “You hear, Simon, your own daughter has to wish she had never got born.”

She drew her daughter upward to her wide bosom, and through the loose basque percolated the warm tears.