“Give up—­”

“Permanently.  Mother and you are buried alive here.  You ought to come to New York to live.  Both of you will love it when you are there for a few days.  I don’t mean to come to a hotel.  I mean to take a little apartment, a furnished apartment at first, to see how you like it—­two rooms and kitchenette, like a playhouse.”

Hosey Brewster looked down at his own big bulk, then around the great furnace room.  “Oh, but listen—­”

“No, I want you to listen first.  Mother’s worn out, I tell you.  It isn’t as if she were the old-fashioned kind; she isn’t.  She loves the theatres, and pretty hats, and shoes with buckles, and lobster, and concerts.”

He broke in again:  “Sure; she likes ’em for a change.  But for a steady diet—­Besides, I’ve got a business to ’tend to.  My gosh!  I’ve got a business to—­”

“You know perfectly well that Wetzler practically runs the whole thing—­or could, if you’d let him.”  Youth is cruel like that, when it wants its way.

He did not even deny it.  He seemed suddenly old.  Pinky’s heart smote her a little.  “It’s just that you’ve got so used to this great barracks you don’t know how unhappy it’s making you.  Why, mother said to-day that she hated it.  I asked about the attic—­the cleaning and all—­and she said she hated it.”

“Did she say that, Paula?”

“Yes.”

He dusted his hands together, slowly, spiritlessly.  His eyes looked pained and dull.  “She did, h’m?  You say she did?” He was talking to himself, and thinking, thinking.

Pinky, sensing victory, left him.  She ran lightly up the cellar stairs, through the first-floor rooms, and up to the second floor.  Her mother’s bedroom door was open.

A little mauve lamp shed its glow upon the tired woman in one of the plump, gray-enamel beds.  “No, I’m not sleeping.  Come here, dear.  What in the world have you been doing in the cellar all this time?”

“Talking to dad.”  She came over and perched herself on the side of the bed.  She looked down at her mother.  Then she bent and kissed her.  Mrs. Brewster looked incredibly girlish with the lamp’s rosy glow on her face and her hair, warmly brown and profuse, rippling out over the pillow.  Scarcely a thread of gray in it.  “You know, mother, I think dad isn’t well.  He ought to go away.”

As if by magic the youth and glow faded out of the face on the pillow.  As she sat up, clutching her nightgown to her breast, she looked suddenly pinched and old.  “What do you mean, Pinky!  Father—­but he isn’t sick.  He—­”

“Not sick.  I don’t mean sick exactly.  But sort of worn out.  That furnace.  He’s sick and tired of the thing; that’s what he said to Fred. He needs a change.  He ought to retire and enjoy life.  He could.  This house is killing both of you.  Why in the world don’t you close it up, or sell it, and come to New York?”

“But we do.  We did.  Last winter—­”