“Why don’t you take out some nice young girl instead of an old woman like me, Hugo?  Any girl would be only too glad.”  But in her heart was a dread.  She thought of Mrs. Lamb, Mrs. Wormser, and Mrs. Brunswick.

So they had gone on, year after year, in the comfortable flat on South Park Avenue.  A pleasant thing, life.

And then Hugo married, suddenly, breathlessly, as a man of forty does.

Afterward, Ma Mandle could recall almost nothing from which she might have taken warning.  That was because he had said so little.  She remembered that he had come home to dinner one evening and had spoken admiringly of a woman buyer from Omaha.  He did not often speak of business.

“She buys like a man,” he had said at dinner.  “I never saw anything like it.  Knew what she wanted and got it.  She bought all my best numbers at rock bottom.  I sold her a four-figure bill in half an hour.  And no fuss.  Everything right to the point and when I asked her out to dinner she turned me down.  Good looking, too.  She’s coming in again to-morrow for novelties.”

Ma Mandle didn’t even recall hearing her name until the knife descended.  Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week, after dinner.  Sentimental things, with a minor wail in the chorus.  Smoked a good deal, too.  Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly during the process and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going.  The following week he didn’t touch the piano and took long walks in Washington Park, alone, after ten.  He seemed uninterested in his meals.  Usually he praised this dish, or that.

“How do you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?”

“’S all right.”  And declined a second piece.

The third week he went West on business.  When he came home he dropped his bag in the hall, strode into his mother’s bedroom, and stood before her like a schoolboy.  “Lil and I are going to be married,” he said.

Ma Mandle had looked up at him, her face a blank.  “Lil?”

“Sure.  I told you all about her.”  He hadn’t.  He had merely thought about her, for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else.  “Ma, you’ll love her.  She knows all about you.  She’s the grandest girl in the world.  Say, I don’t know why she ever fell for a dub like me.  Well, don’t look so stunned.  I guess you kind of suspicioned, huh?”

“But who—?”

“I never thought she’d look at me.  Earned her own good salary, and strictly business, but she’s a real woman.  Says she wants her own home an—­’n everything.  Says every normal woman does.  Says—­”

Ad lib.

They were married the following month.