“I believe it, Mawruss,” Abe said ironically.  “But, anyhow, I’m going to ring up that oitermobile concern on Forty-sixth Street and tell ’em to send it around here at twelve o’clock.  Then you can go up there to the hotel, and if that Miss Atkinson ain’t had her lunch yet buy it for her, Mawruss, for so sure as you stand there I bet yer that young feller, Ike, has rung up this here Max Tuchman and told him all about us going up there to take her out in an oitermobile.  I bet yer Max will get the biggest oitermobile he can find up there right away, and he’s going to steal her away from us, sure, if we don’t hustle.”

“Dreams you got it, Abe,” Morris said.  “How should this here young feller, Ralph Tuchman, know that Miss Aaronson was a customer of his Uncle Max Tuchman, Abe?”

Abe looked at Morris more in sorrow than in anger.  “Mawruss,” he said, “do me the favor once and write that name down.  A-T at, K-I-N kin, S-O-N son, Atkinson—­not Aaronson.”

“That’s what I said—­Atkinson—­Abe,” Morris protested; “and if you’re so scared we’re going to lose her, Abe, go ahead and ’phone.  We got to sell goods to lady buyers some time, Abe, and we may as well make the break now.”

Abe waited to hear no more, but hastened to the ’phone, and when he returned a few minutes later he found that Morris had gone to the barber shop across the street.  Twenty minutes afterward a sixty-horsepower machine arrived at the store door just as Morris came up the steps of the barber shop underneath Wasserbauer’s Cafe and Restaurant.  He almost bumped into Philip Plotkin, of Kleinberg & Plotkin, who was licking the refractory wrapper of a Wheeling stogy, with one eye fixed on the automobile in front of his competitors’ store.

“Hallo, Mawruss,” Philip cried.  “Pretty high-toned customers you must got it when they come down to the store in oitermobiles, ain’t it?”

Morris flashed his gold fillings in a smile of triumphant superiority.  “That ain’t no customer’s oitermobile, Philip,” he said.  “That’s for us an oitermobile, what we take it out our customers riding in.”

“Why don’t you take it out credit men from commission houses riding, Mawruss?” Philip rejoined as Morris stepped from the curb to cross the street.  This was an allusion to the well-known circumstance that with credit men a customer’s automobile-riding inspires as much confidence as his betting on the horse races, and when Morris climbed into the tonneau he paid little attention to Abe’s instructions, so busy was he glancing around him for prying credit men.  At length, with a final jar and jerk the machine sprang forward, and for the rest of the journey Morris’ mind was emptied of every other apprehension save that engendered of passing trucks or street cars.  Finally, the machine drew up in front of the Prince William and Morris scrambled out, trembling in every limb.  He made at once for the clerk’s desk.