Hugo sub-leased the flat on South Park and took an eight-room apartment farther east.  Ma Mandle’s red and green plush parlour pieces, and her mahogany rockers, and her rubber plant, and the fern, and the can of grapefruit pits that she and Anna had planted and that had come up, miraculously, in the form of shiny, thick little green leaves, all were swept away in the upheaval that followed.  Gone, too, was Polish Anna, with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her gutturals.  In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons.  The sight of the neat Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury.  Anna had been an all-day scrubber.

But Lil.  Hugo thought her very beautiful, which she was not.  A plump, voluble, full-bosomed woman, exquisitely neat, with a clear, firm skin, bright brown eyes, an unerring instinct for clothes, and a shrewd business head.  Hugo’s devotion amounted to worship.

He used to watch her at her toilette in their rose and black mahogany front bedroom.  Her plump white shoulders gleamed from pink satin straps.  She smelled pleasantly of sachet and a certain heady scent she affected.  Seated before the mirror, she stared steadily at herself with a concentration such as an artist bestows upon a work that depends, for its perfection, upon nuances of light and shade.  Everything about her shone and glittered.  Her pink nails were like polished coral.  Her hair gleamed in smooth undulations, not a strand out of place.  Her skin was clear and smooth as a baby’s.  Her hands were plump and white.  She was always getting what she called a facial, from which process she would emerge looking pinker and creamier than ever.  Lil knew when camisoles were edged with filet, and when with Irish.  Instinctively she sensed when taffeta was to be superseded by foulard.  The contents of her scented bureau drawers needed only a dab of whipped cream on top to look as if they might have been eaten as something souffle.

“How do I look in it, Hugo?  Do you like it?” was a question that rose daily to her lips.  A new hat, or frock, or collar, or negligee.  Not that she was unduly extravagant.  She knew values, and profited by her knowledge.

“Le’s see.  Turn around.  It looks great on you.  Yep.  That’s all right.”

He liked to fancy himself a connoisseur in women’s clothes and to prove it he sometimes brought home an article of feminine apparel glimpsed in a shop window or showcase, but Lil soon put a stop to that.  She had her own ideas on clothes.  He turned to jewellery.  On Lil’s silken bosom reposed a diamond-and-platinum pin the size and general contour of a fish-knife.  She had a dinner ring that crowded the second knuckle, and on her plump wrist sparkled an oblong so encrusted with diamonds that its utilitarian dial was almost lost.