Ten minutes later he was approached by Jake, the shipping-clerk.

“Mr. Potash,” Jake said, “them two ladies in the show-room wants to know if you would maybe give that party they was talking about a recommendation to the President of the Kosciusko Bank?”

“Tell ’em,” Abe said, “I’ll give ’em a recommendation to a policeman if they don’t get right out of here.  The only way what a feller should deal with a nervy proposition like that, Mawruss, is to squash it in the bud.”

In matters pertaining to real estate Marks Henochstein held himself to be a virtuoso.

“If anyone can put it through, I can,” was his motto, and he tackled the job of procuring an uptown loft for Potash & Perlmutter with the utmost confidence.

“In the first place,” he said when he called the next day, “you boys has got too much room.”

“Boys!” Morris exclaimed.  “Since when did we go to school together, Henochstein?”

“Anyhow, you got too much room, ain’t yer?” Henochstein continued, his confidence somewhat diminished by the rebuff.  “You could get your workrooms and show-rooms all on one floor, and besides——­”

Morris raised his hand like a traffic policeman halting an obstreperous truckman.

“S’enough, Henochstein,” he said.  “S’enough about that.  We ain’t giving you no pointers in the real-estate business, and we don’t want no suggestions about the cloak and suit business neither.  We asked it you to get us two lofts on Seventeenth, Eighteenth or Nineteenth Street, the same size as here and for the same what we pay it here rent.  If you can’t do it let us know, that’s all, and we get somebody else to do it.  Y’understand?”

“Oh, I can do it all right.”

“Sure he can do it,” Abe said encouragingly.

“And I’ll bring you a list as big as the telephone directory to-morrow,” Henochstein added as he went out.  “But all the same, boys—­I mean Mr. Perlmutter—­I don’t think you need it all that space.”

“That’s a fresh real-estater for you, Abe,” Morris said after Henochstein left.  “Wants to tell it us our business and calls us boys yet, like we was friends from the old country already.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Mawruss,” Abe replied.  “He means it good, I guess; and anyway, Mawruss, we give so much of our work out by contractors, we might as well give the whole thing out and be done with it.  We might as well have one loft with the cutting-room in the back and a rack for piece goods.  Then the whole front we could fit it up as an office and show-room yet, and we would have no noise of the machines and no more trouble with garment-makers’ unions nor nothing.  I think it’s a good idee sending out all the work.”

“Them contractors makes enough already on what we give them, Abe,” Morris replied.  “I bet yer Satinstein buys real estate on what he makes from us, Abe, and Ginsburg & Kaplan also.”

“Well, the fact is, Mawruss,” Abe went on, “I ain’t at all satisfied with the way what Satinstein treats us, Mawruss, nor Ginsburg & Kaplan neither.  I got an idee, Mawruss:  we should give all our work to a decent, respectable young feller what is going to marry a cousin of my wife, by the name Miriam Smolinski.”