A singular devotion to duty marked every action of Emanuel Gubin, shipping clerk in the wholesale cloak and suit establishment of Potash & Perlmutter.  That is to say, it had marked every action until the commencement of Miss Kreitmann’s incumbency.  In the very hour that Emanuel first observed the luster of her fine black eyes his heart gave one bound and never more regained its normal gait.

As for Miss Kreitmann, she saw only a shipping clerk, collarless, coatless and with all the grime of his calling upon him.  Two weeks elapsed, however, and one evening, on Lenox Avenue, she encountered Emanuel, freed from the chrysalis of his employment, a natty, lavender-trousered butterfly of fashion.  Thereafter she called him Mannie, and during business hours she flashed upon him those same black eyes with results disastrous to the shipping end of Potash & Perlmutter’s business.

Packages intended for the afternoon delivery of a local express company arrived in Florida two weeks later, while the irate buyer of a Jersey City store, who impatiently awaited an emergency shipment of ten heavy winter garments, received instead half a hundred gossamer wraps designed for the sub-tropical weather of Palm Beach.

“I don’t know what’s come over that fellow, Mawruss,” Abe said at last.  “Formerly he was a crackerjack—­never made no mistakes nor nothing; and now I dassen’t trust him at all, Mawruss.  Everything we ship I got to look after it myself, Mawruss.  We might as well have no shipping clerk at all.”

“You’re right, Abe,” Morris replied.  “He gets carelesser every day.  And why, Abe?  Because of that Miss Kreitmann.  She breaks us all up, Abe.  I bet yer if that feller Gubin has took her to the theayter once, Abe, he took her fifty times already.  He spends every cent he makes on her, and the first thing you know, Abe, we’ll be missing a couple of pieces of silk from the cutting-room.  Ain’t it?”

“He ain’t no thief, Mawruss,” said Abe, “and, besides, you can’t blame a young feller if he gets stuck on a nice girl like Miss Kreitmann, Mawruss.  She’s a smart girl, Mawruss.  Mendel Immerglick, of Immerglick & Frank, was in here yesterday, Mawruss, and she showed him the line, Mawruss, and believe me, Mawruss, Immerglick says to me I couldn’t have done it better myself.”

“Huh!” Morris snorted.  “A young feller like Immerglick, what buys it of us a couple of hundred dollars at a time, she falls all over herself to please him, Abe.  And why?  Because Immerglick’s got a fine mustache and is a swell dresser and he ain’t married.  But you take it a good customer like Adolph Rothstein, Abe, and what does she do?  At first she was all smiles to him, because Adolph is a good-looking feller.  But then she hears him telling me a hard-luck story about his wife’s operation and how his eldest boy Sammie is now seven already and ain’t never been sick in his life, and last month he gets the whooping cough