But she never failed to inspect the groceries as they lay on the kitchen table after delivery.  She would press a wise and disdainful thumb into a head of lettuce; poke a pot-roast with disapproving finger; turn a plump chicken over and thump it down with a look that was pregnant with meaning.

Ma Mandle disapproved of many things.  Of Lil’s silken, lacy lingerie; of her social activities; of what she termed her wastefulness.  Lil wore the fewest possible undergarments, according to the fashion of the day, and she worried, good-naturedly, about additional plumpness that was the result of leisure and of rich food.  She was addicted to afternoon parties at the homes of married women of her own age and station—­pretty, well-dressed, over-indulged women who regularly ate too much.  They served a mayonnaise chicken salad, and little hot buttery biscuits, and strong coffee with sugar and cream, and there were dishes of salted almonds, and great, shining, oily, black ripe olives, and a heavy, rich dessert.  When she came home she ate nothing.

“I couldn’t eat a bite of dinner,” she would say.  “Let me tell you what we had.”  She would come to the table in one of her silken, lace-bedecked teagowns and talk animatedly to Hugo while he ate his dinner and eyed her appreciatively as she sat there leaning one elbow on the cloth, the sleeve fallen back so that you saw her plump white forearm.  She kept her clear, rosy skin in spite of the pastry and sweets and the indolent life, and even the layers of powder with which she was forever dabbing her face had not coarsened its texture.

Hugo, man-like, was unconscious of the undercurrent of animosity between the two women.  He was very happy.  He only knew that Lil understood about cigar ashes; that she didn’t mind if a pillow wasn’t plumped and patted after his Sunday nap on the davenport; that she never complained to him about the shortcomings of the little Swede, as Ma Mandle had about Polish Anna.  Even at house-cleaning time, which Ma Mandle had always treated as a scourge, things were as smooth-running and peaceful as at ordinary times.  Just a little bare, perhaps, as to floors, and smelling of cleanliness.  Lil applied businesslike methods to the conduct of her house, and they were successful in spite of Ma Mandle’s steady efforts to block them.  Old lady Mandle did not mean to be cruel.  She only thought that she was protecting her son’s interests.  She did not know that the wise men had a definite name for the mental processes which caused her, perversely, to do just the thing which she knew she should not do.

Hugo and Lil went out a great deal in the evening.  They liked the theatre, restaurant life, gayety.  Hugo learned to dance and became marvellously expert at it, as does your fat man.

“Come on and go out with us this evening, Mother,” Lil would say.

“Sure!” Hugo would agree, heartily.  “Come along, Ma.  We’ll show you some night life.”