“You bet,” Abe agreed fervently.

Mr. Burke smiled.  “You got a good line, Mr. Potash,” he said.  “Ever so much better than Klinger & Klein’s.”

“That’s what they have,” Mr. Small agreed.  “But it don’t make no difference, anyhow.  I’d give them the order if the line wasn’t near so good.”

He put his arm around Abe’s shoulder.  “It stands in the Talmud, an old saying, but a true one,” he said—­“‘Blood is redder than water.’”

CHAPTER X

The Small Drygoods Company’s order was the forerunner of a busy season that taxed the energies of not only Abe and Morris but of their entire business staff as well, and when the hot weather set in, Morris could not help noticing the fagged-out appearance of Miss Cohen the bookkeeper.

“We should give that girl a vacation, Abe,” he said.  “She worked hard and we ought to show her a little consideration.”

“I know, Mawruss,” Abe replied; “but she ain’t the only person what works hard around here, Mawruss.  I work hard, too, Mawruss, but I ain’t getting no vacation.  That’s a new idee what you got, Mawruss.”

“Everybody gives it their bookkeeper a vacation, Abe,” Morris protested.

“Do they?” Abe rejoined.  “Well, if bookkeepers gets vacations, Mawruss, where are we going to stop?  First thing you know, Mawruss, we’ll be giving cutters vacations, and operators vacations, and before we get through we got our workroom half empty yet and paying for full time already.  If she wants a vacation for two weeks I ain’t got no objections, Mawruss, only we don’t pay her no wages while she’s gone.”

“You can’t do that, Abe,” Morris said.  “That would be laying her off, Abe; that wouldn’t be no vacation.”

“But we got to have somebody here to keep our books while she’s away, Mawruss,” Abe cried.  “We got to make it a living, Mawruss.  We can’t shut down just because Miss Cohen gets a vacation.  And so it stands, Mawruss, we got to pay Miss Cohen wages for doing nothing, Mawruss, and also we got to pay it wages to somebody else for doing something what Miss Cohen should be doing when she ain’t, ain’t it?”

“Sure, we got to get a substitute for her while she’s away,” Morris agreed; “but I guess it won’t break us.”

“All right, Mawruss,” Abe replied; “if I got to hear it all summer about this here vacation business I’m satisfied.  I got enough to do in the store without worrying about that, Mawruss.  Only one thing I got to say it, Mawruss:  we got to have a bookkeeper to take her place while she’s away, and you got to attend to that, Mawruss.  That’s all I got to say.”

Morris nodded and hastened to break the good news to Miss Cohen, who for the remainder of the week divided her time between Potash & Perlmutter’s accounts and a dozen multicolored railroad folders.

“Look at that, Mawruss,” Abe said as he gazed through the glass paneling of the show-room toward the bookkeeper’s desk.  “That girl ain’t done it a stroke of work since we told her she could go already.  What are we running here, anyway:  a cloak and suit business or a cut-rate ticket office?”