Читать книгу Every Soul Hath Its Song - Fannie Hurst - Страница 10

"'Sh-h-h-h."

He retreated behind the mauve-colored swinging-door. The two remaining sibyls, hatted and coated to crane the neck of the passer-by, hurried arm-in-arm out into the spring evening. An errand girl, who had dropped her skirt and put up her hair so that the eye of the law might wink at her stigma of youth, hung the shimmering gowns away for another day's display. Gertie Dobriner patted her ringed fingers against her mouth to press back a yawn and trailed across the room, adjusting her hat before a full-length mirror. In the light from a single electric bulb her hair showed three colors—yellow gold, green gold, and, toward the roots, the dark gold of old bronze.

"You can go now, Gert."

"Yes, madam."

Miss Dobriner adjusted a spray of curls. Through the mirror she could observe the mauve-colored swinging-door.

"Did—did Du Gass order that fish-tail model, madam?"

Madam Moores dallied with her appointment-book. Through the mirror she could observe the mauve-colored swinging-door.

"Yes, in green."

"If I had her complexion I'd wear sandpaper to match it."

"We haven't all of us got the looks, Gert, that'll get us four-carat stones to wear down to a twenty-dollar-a-week job."

Miss Dobriner's hand flew to her throat and the gem that gleamed there. "I—I guess I can buy a stone on time for myself without—without any insinuations."

"You can wear the stone, all right, Gert, but you can't get past the insinuations."

"I—I ain't so stuck on this place, madam, that I got to stand for your insinuations."

"No, it ain't the place you're stuck on that keeps you here, Gert."

They regarded each other through eyes banked with the red fires of anger, and beside the full-length mirror Miss Dobriner trembled as she stood.

"You can think what you please, madam. I—I'm hired by Phonzie and I'm here to wear models and not to steer your thinking."

Madam Moores sat so tense in her chair that her weight did not relax to it. "You and me can't have no fusses, you know that, don't you? I give Phonzie the run of my floor, and he's the one has to deal with—with freshness."

"You—you started it, madam. I—can get along with anybody. I don't have to stay in a place where I'm not wanted; it's just because Phonzie—"

"We won't fuss about it, Gertie. I'm the last one to fall out with my help."

Silence.

"Did—did Laidlaw order that trotteur model in plaid, Gert?"

"No; she's coming back to-morrow."

"To-day's the day to land an order."

"She says that pongee we made her last spring never fit her slick enough between the shoulders. I felt like telling her we don't guarantee to fit tubs."

"You got to handle Laidlaw right, Gert. There'll be two trousseaux and a ball in that family before June. The best way to lose a customer like Laidlaw is to sell her what she ought to wear instead of what she wants to wear."

"Handle her right! I wore rubber gloves. Did I quiver an eyelash when she ordered that pink organdie, and didn't Phonzie nearly double up when he took down the order? You want to see her measurements. I'll get the book and—"

"No, no, Gert; you can go on. I got to stay and go over the appointments with Phonzie."

A quick red flowed up and under the rouged surface of Miss Dobriner's cheeks. "Oh—excuse me!"

"What!"

"I—All right, I'm going."

She readjusted her hat, a tiny winged chariot of pink straw and designed after fashion's most epileptic caprice, coaxed her ringed fingers into a pair of but slightly soiled white gloves, her eyes the while staring past her slim reflection in the mirror and on to the mauve-colored swinging-door.

"Good night, Gert."

Miss Dobriner bared her teeth to a smile and closed her lips again before she spoke. "Good night—madam."

Then she went out, clicking the door behind her. Through the mauve-colored swinging-door and scarcely a clock-tick later entered Mr. Alphonse Michelson, spick, light-footed, slim.

"Charley's left with the black lace, madam."

It was as if Madam Moores suddenly threw off the husk of the day.

"Tired, Phonzie?"

He ran a hand across his silk hair and glanced about. "Everybody gone?"

"Yes."

He reached for his hat and cane and a pair of untried gray gloves atop them. "I sent the yellow taffeta out on a C.O.D. That gold buckle she wanted on the shoulder cost her just twenty bucks more."

"Good!"

He fitted on his hat carefully and snapped his gloves across his palm.

"Well, I'm off, madam."

She adjusted her hat in a simulation of indifference. "Like to come up to the flat for supper and—and go over the books, Phonzie?"

"Huh?"

"There's plenty for two and—and we could kind of go over things."

He twirled his cane. "Oh, I—I'm running up there too often, sponging off you."

"Sponging! Like I'd ask you if I didn't want you!"

"I been up there sponging off you three times this week. Anyways, I'm—"

"Don't I always just give you pot luck?"

"Yes, but you'll think afterwhile that I got you mixed up with my meal-ticket."

A sensitive seepage of blood rushed over Madam Moores's nervous face, stinging it. "Of course, if you won't want to come!"

"Don't want to come! A fellow that's never had a snap like your cozy corner in his life—"

"Of course if—if you got a date with one of—of the models or something."

"I never said that, did I?"

"Well, get that sponging idea out of your head, Phonzie. There's always plenty for two in my cupboard. Like I says the other night, what's the use being able to afford my little flat if I can't get some pleasure out of it?"

"It sure looks good to this hall-room Johnnie."

She gathered her gloves and her black silk handbag. "Then come, Phonzie," she said, "I'm going to take you home." And her throat might have been lined with fur.

They went out together, locking the doors behind them, and into an evening as soft as silk and full of stars.

Along the wide up-town street the human tide flowed fast and as if thaw had set in, releasing it from the bondage of winter. Girls in light wraps and without hats loitered in the white flare of drugstore lights. Here and there a brown stoop bloomed with a boarder or two. In front of Seligman's florist shop, which occupied the ground floor of Madam Moores's dressmaking establishment, Alphonse Michelson paused for a moment in the flare of its decorative show-window and flecked at his hatband with sheer untried handkerchief.

"Come on, Phonzie."

"Coming, madam."

In the up-town Subway, bound for the up-town flat, he leaned to her with his small blond mustache raised in a smile.

"Where's the book, madam?"

"Forgot it," she replied, without shame.

* * * * *

Out of three hundred and eighty dollars cash, a bit of black and gold brocade flung adroitly over the imitation hearth, a cot masquerading under a Mexican afghan of many colors, a canary in a cage, a potted geranium, a shallow chair with a threadbare head-rest, a lamp, a rug, a two-burner gas-stove, Madam Moores had evolved Home.

And why not? The Petit Trianon was built that a queen might there find rest from marble halls. The Borghese women in their palaces live behind drawn shades, but Italian peasants sit in their low doorways and sing as they rock and suckle.

In Madam Moores's two-flights-up flat the windows were flung open to the moist air of spring, which flowed in cool as water between crisp muslin curtains, stirring them. In the sudden flare of electric light the canary unfolded its head from a sheaf of wing, cheeped, and fell to picking up seed from the bottom of its cage.

Mr. Alphonse Michelson collapsed into the shallow chair beside the table and relaxed his head against the threadbare dent in the upholstery.

"Whoops! home never was like this!"

"Is him tired?"

"Dead."

"Smoke?"

"Yep."

"There."

"Ah!"

"Now him all comfy and I go fix poor tired bad boy him din-din."

More native than mother-tongue is Mother's tongue. Whom women love they would first destroy with gibberish. To Mr. Michelson's linguistic credit, however, he shifted in his chair in unease.

"What did you say?"

"What him want for din-din?"

He slung one slim leg atop the other, slumping deeper to the luxury of his chair. "Dinner?"

"Yes, din-din."

"Say, those were swell chicken livers smothered in onions you served the other night, madam. Believe me, those were some livers!"

No, reader, Romance is not dead. On the contrary, he has survived the frock-coat and learned to chew a clove.

A radiance as soft as the glow from a pink-shaded lamp flowed over Madam

Moores's face.

"Livers him going to have and biscuits made in my own ittsie bittsie oven. Eh?"

"Swell."

She divested herself of her wraps, fluffing her mahogany-colored hair where the hat had restricted it, lighted a tiny stove off in the tiny kitchenette and enveloped herself in a blue-bib-top apron. Her movements were short and full of caprice, and when she set the table, brushing his chair as she passed and repassed, lights came out in her eyes when she dared raise her lids to show them.

They dined by the concealed fireplace and from off a table that could fold its legs under like Aladdin's. Fumes of well-made coffee rose as ingratiating as the perfume of a love story. Mr. Michelson dropped a lump of butter into the fluffy heart of a biscuit and clapped the halves together.

"Some biscuits!"

"Bad boy, stop jollying."

"Say, if I'd tell you the truth about what I think of these biscuits, you'd say I was writing a streetcar advertisement for baking-powder. Say, this is some cup custard!"

"More?"

"Full to my eyebrows."

"Just a little bittsie?"

"Nope."

He lighted a cigarette and they settled back in after-dinner completeness, their dessert-plates pushed well toward the center of the table and their senses quiet. She pleated the edge of her napkin and watched him blow leisurely spirals of smoke to the ceiling.

"What you thinking about, Phonzie?"

"Nothing."

"Honest?"

"If I was thinking at all I was just sizing it up as pretty soft for a fellow like me to get this sort of stand-in with—with my boss. Gawd! me and Roth used to love each other like snakes."

"I—I ain't your boss, Phonzie. Don't I give you the run of everything—hiring the models and all?"

"Sure you're my boss, and it's pretty soft for me."

"And I was just thinking, Phonzie, that it's pretty soft for me to have found a fellow like you to manage things for me."

"Shucks!"

"Without you, so used to the ways of the Avenue and all that kind of thing, where would I be now, trying to run in the right kind of bluff with the trade?"

"That's easy! After all, Fifth Avenue and Third Avenue is pretty much alike in the end, madam. A spade may be a spade, but if you're a good salesman, you can put it on black velvet and sell it for a dessert-spoon any day in the week."

"That's just what I'm saying, Phonzie, about you're knowing how. I needed just a fellow like you to show me how the swell trade has got to be blindfolded, and that the difference between a dressmaker and a modiste is about a hundred and fifty dollars a gown."

"You ought to see the way we handled them when I was on the floor for Roth. Say, we wouldn't touch a peignoir in that establishment for under two hundred and fifty, and—we had 'em coming in there like sheep. The Riverside Drive trade is nothing, madam, compared to what we could do down there with the Avenue business."

"You sure know how to handle the lorgnette bunch, Phonzie."

"Is it any wonder, being in the business twenty years?"

"Twenty years! Why, Phonzie, you—you don't look much more than twenty yourself."

He laughed, shifting one knee to the other. "That's because you can't see that my eye teeth are gold, madam."

"You're so light on your feet, Phonzie, and slick."

"To look twenty and feel your forty years ain't what it's cracked up to be. If I had a home of my own, you know what I'd buy first—a pair of carpet slippers and a patent rocker."

"I bet you mean it, too, Phonzie."

"Sure I mean it! How'd you like to go through life like me, trying to keep the kink ironed in my hair and out of my back, or lose my job at the only kind of work I'm good for? It's like having to live with a grin frozen on your face so you can't close your mouth."

"I—I just can't get over it, Phonzie, you forty! You five years older than me and me afraid—thinking all along it was just the other way."

"I had already shed my milk teeth before you were born, madam."

"Whatta you know about that!"

"Ask Gert. She's been following me around from place to place for years, sticking to me because I say there ain't a model in the business can show the clothes like she can."

"Yes?"

"Ask her; she's my age and we been on the job together for twenty years. Long before live models was even known in the business, she and me were showing goods in the old Cunningham place on Madison Avenue."

"Even—even back there you was dead set on having good figures around the place, wasn't you, Phonzie?"

"I tell you it's economy in the end, madam, to have figures that can show off the goods to advantage."

"Oh, I'm not kicking, Phonzie, but I was just saying."

"I have been in the business long enough, madam, to learn that the greatest way in the world to show gowns is on live stock. A dame will fall for any sort of a rag stuck on a figure like Gert's, and think the waist-line and all is thrown in with the dress. You seen for yourself Van Ness order five gowns right off Gert's back to-day. Would she have fallen for them if we had shown them in the hand? Not much! She forgot all about her own thirty-eight waist-line when she ordered that pink organdie. She was seeing Gert's twenty-two inches."

"But honest, Phonzie, take a girl like Gert, even with her figure, she—Oh, I don't know, there's something about her!"

"She may rub your fur the wrong way, madam, but under all her flip ways they don't come no finer than Gert."

"No, it ain't that, only she don't always get across. Take Lipton; she won't even let her show her a gown; she's always calling for Dodo instead. Sometimes I think the trade takes exceptions to a girl like Gert, her all decked out in diamonds that—show how—how fly she must be."

"Gertie Dobriner's the best in the business, just the same, madam. She ain't stuck on her way of living no more than I am, but she's a model and she 'ain't got enough of anything else in her to make the world treat her any different than a model."

"I'm not saying she ain't a good thirty-six, Phonzie."

"I got to hand it to her, madam, when it comes to a lot of things. She may be a little skylarker, but take it from me, it ain't from choice, and when she likes you—God! honest, I think that girl would pawn her soul for you. When I was down with pneumonia—"

"I ain't saying a thing against her."

"She's no saint, maybe, but then God knows I'm not, either, and what I don't know about her private life don't bother me."

"Oh, I—I know you like her all right."

"Say, I'll bet you any amount if that girl had memory enough to learn the words of a song or the steps of a dance, she could have landed a first-row job in any musical show on Broadway. She could do it now, for that matter. Gad! did you see her to-day showing off that Queen Louise cloth-of-gold model? Honest, she took my breath away, and I been on the floor with her twenty years."

"Y-yes."

"Keep down your hips and waist-line, Gert, I always say to her, and you are good in the business for ten years yet."

"She should worry while the crop of four carats is good."

"Yes, but just the same a girl like her don't know when her luck may turn. A girl can lose her luck sometimes before she loses her figure."

"Any old time she can lose her luck with you."

"Me!"

"Yes, you!"

Madam Moores bent over the pleats in her napkin. Opposite her, his cigarette held fastidiously aloft, he regarded her through its haze.

"Well, of all things! So that—that's what you think?"

"I—I know."

"Know what?"

"That she's dead strong for you."

"Sure she is, but what's that got to do with it? That girl's like—well, she's like a sister or—or a pal to me, but she's got about as much time for a fellow of my pace, except when she gets blue, as—as the Queen of Sheba has."

"That's what you think, maybe, but everybody else knows she—she's been after you for years, trying—"

"Aw, cut the comedy, madam. Honest, you make me sore. She's nothing to me off the floor but a darn good pal. Say, I can treat her to a sixty-cent table d'hôte twice a week; but don't you think in the back of my head, when it comes to a showdown, that I couldn't even buy silk shoelaces for a girl of her kind. I ain't her pace and we both know it. Bosh!"

"You'd like to be, all right, if—if she didn't have so many rich ones hanging around."

"Just the same, many's the time she's told me if she could land a regular fellow and do the regular thing and settle down on seventy-five a month in a Harlem flat, why she'd drop all this skylarking of hers for a family of youngsters, so quick it would make your head swim."

"Sure, that's just what I say, she—"

"Many's the time she—she's cried to me—just cried, because the kind of life she has to live don't lead to anything, and she knows it."

"I ain't blaming you for liking her, Phonzie; a girl with her figure can make an old dub like me look like—well, I just guess after her I—I must look like thirty cents to you."

"You! Say, you got more real sense in your little finger than three of

Gert's kind put together."

She colored like a wild rose.

"Sense ain't what counts with the men nowadays; it's looks and—and speed like Gert's."

"Girls like Gert are all right, I tell you; but say, when it comes to real brains like yours—nobody home."

"Maybe not, but just the same it's the girls with sense get tired having the men rave about their smartness and pass on, to go rushing after a empty head completely smothered under yellow curls. That's how much real brains counts for with—with you men."

He flung her a gesture, his cigarette trailing a design in smoke. "Honest, madam, you got me wrong there. A fellow like me 'ain't got the nerve to—to go after a woman like you. A girl like Dodo or Gert is my size, but I'd be a swell dub trying to line up alongside of you, now wouldn't I?"

Tears that were distilled in her heart rose to her eyes, dimming them.

Her hand fluttered in among the plates and cups and saucers toward him.

"Phonzie, I—I—"

"You what?"

"I—I—Aw, nothing."

Her head fell suddenly forward in her arms, pushing the elaborate coiffure awry, and beneath the blue-checked apron her shoulders heaved.

He rose. "Madam! Why, madam, what—"

"Don't—don't pay any attention to me, Phonzie. I—I just got a silly fit on me. I'll be all right in a minute."

"Aw, madam, I—I didn't mean to make you sore by anything I said."

"You go now, Phonzie; the whole evening don't need to be spoiled for you just because I went and got a silly fit of blues on. You—you go get some live one like Gert and—and take her out skylarking."

"You're sore about Gert, is that it, madam?"

"No, no. Honest, Phonzie."

"Madam, I—I just don't know what's got you. Is it something I said has hurt your feelings?"

"No, no."

He advanced with an incertitude that muddled his movements, made to cross to her side where she lay with her arms outstretched in the fuddle of dishes, made to touch her black silk sleeve where it emerged from the blue-checked apron, hesitated, sucking his lips in between his teeth, swung on his heel, then around once more, and placed his hand lightly on her shoulder.

"Madam?"

"You—you just go on, Phonzie. I—I guess I'm an old fool, anyways. It's like trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip for me to try and squeeze anything but work out of my life. I—I guess I'm just nothing but an old fool."

"But, madam, how can a fellow like me squeeze anything out of life for you? Look at me! Why, I ain't worth your house room. I'm nothing but a fellow who draws his salary off a woman, and has all his life. Why, you—you earn as much in a week as I do in a month."

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Look, you with a home you made for yourself and a business you built up out of your own brains, and what am I? A hall-room guy that can put a bluff across with a lot of idiot women. Look at me, forty and doing a chorus-man's work. You got me wrong, madam. I don't measure nowheres near up to you. If I did, do you think I wouldn't be settled down long ago like a regular—Aw, well, what's the use talking." He plucked at his short mustache, pulling the hairs sharply.

She raised her face and let him gaze at the ravages of her tears. "Why—why don't you come right out and say it, that I 'ain't got the looks and—the pep?"

"Madam, can't you see I'm only—"

"You—you can't run yourself down to me. You, and nobody else, has made the establishment what it is. I never had a head for the little things that count. That's why I spent my best years down in Twenty-third Street. What did I know about the big little things!—the carriage-call stunt and the sachet-bags in the lining and the blue and gold labels, all little things that get big results. I never had a head for the things that hold the rich trade, like the walking models, or the French accent."

"You got the head for the big things, and that's what counts."

"That's why, when you say you can't line up alongside of me, it's no excuse."

"I—I mean it."

"Just because I got a head for designing doesn't make me a nine days' wonder. Why don't you—you come right out and say what you mean, Phonzie?"

"Why, I—I don't even know how to talk to a woman like you, madam. La-La girls have always been my pace."

"I know, Phonzie, and I—I ain't blaming you. A slick-looking fellow like you can skylark around as he pleases and don't need to have time for—the overworked, tired-out ones like me."

"Madam, I never dreamed—"

"Dreamed! Phonzie, I—I've got no shame if I tell you, but, God! how many nights I—I've lain right here on this couch dreaming of—of—"

"Well?"

"Of you and me, Phonzie, hitting it off together."

"Madam!"

Her head burrowed deeper in her arms, her voice muffed in their depth.

"Madam!"

"How many times I've dreamed, Phonzie. You and me, real partners in the business and—and in everything. Us in a little home together, one of the five-room flats down on the next floor, with a life-size kitchen and a life-size dining-room and—and a life-size—Aw, Phonzie, you—you'll think I'm crazy."

"Madam, why, madam, I just don't know."

"Them's the dreams a silly old thing like me, that never had nothing but work and—and nothing else in her life, can lay right here on this couch, night after night, and—Gawd! I—I bet you think I—I'm just crazy, Phonzie."

For answer he leaned over and took her small figure in his arms, wiping away with his sheer untried handkerchief the tears; but fresh ones sashayed down her face and flowed over her words.

"Phonzie, tell me, do you—do you—think—"

He held her closer. "Sure, madam, I do."

* * * * *

On the wings of a twelvemonth, spring had come around again and the taste of summer was like poppy-leaves between the teeth, and the perennial open shirtwaists and open street-cars bloomed, even as the distant larkspur in the distant field. At six o'clock with darkness came a spattering of rain, heavy single drops that fell each with its splotch, exuding from the asphalt the warming smell of thaw. Then came wind, right high-tempered, too, slanting the rain and scudding it and blowing pedestrians' skirts forward and their umbrellas inside outward. Mr. Alphonse Michelson fitted his hand like a vizor over his eyes and peered out into the wet dusk. Lights gleamed and were reflected in the dark pool of rain-swept asphalt. Passers-by hurried for shelter and bent into the wind.

In Madam Moores's establishment, enlarged during the twelvemonth to twice its floor space, the business day waned and died; in the workrooms the whir of machines sank into the quiet maw of darkness; in the showrooms the shower lights, all but a single cluster, blinked out. Alphonse Michelson slid into a tan, rain-proof coat, turning up the collar and buttoning across the flap, then fell to pacing the thick-nap carpet.

From a mauve-colored telephone-booth emerged Miss Gertie Dobriner, flushed from bad service and from bad air.

"Whew!"

"Get her?"

"Sure I got her. Is it such a stunt to get an address from a customer?"

"Good!"

"I says to her, I says, 'I seen it standing on the sidewalk next to your

French maid and I wanted to buy one like it for my little niece.'"

"Can we get it to-night?"

"Yes, proud papa! But listen; I wrote it down, 'Hinshaw, 2227 Casset

Street, Brooklyn.'"

"Brooklyn!"

"Yes, two blocks from the Bridge, and for a henpecked husband you got a large fat job on your hands if you want to make another getaway to-night. This man Hinshaw shows 'em right in his house."

"Brooklyn, of all places!"

"Right-oh!"

He snapped his fingers in a series of rapid clicks. "Ain't that the limit? If I'd only mentioned it to you this afternoon earlier, we could have been over and back by now."

"Wait until Monday then, Phonzie."

"Yes, but you ought to have heard her this morning, Gert; it's not often she gets her heart so set. To-morrow being Sunday, all of a sudden she gets a-wishing for one of the glass-top ones like she's seen around in the parks, to take him out in for the first time."

"Oh, I'm game! I'll go, but can you beat it! A trip to Brooklyn when I got a friend from Carson City waiting at his hotel to buy out Rector's for me to-night."

"You go on with him, Gert. What's the use you dragging over there, too, now that you got the address for me. I would never have mentioned it to you at all if I'd have known you couldn't just go buy the kind she wants in any department store. I'll go over there alone, Gert."

"Yes, and get stung on the shape and the hood and all. I bought just an ordinary one for my little niece once, and you got to get them shallow. Anyways, I'm going to chip in half on this. I want to get the little devil something, anyways."

"Aw no, Gert, this is my surprise."

"I guess I can chip in on a present for the kid's month-old birthday."

"Well, then, say I meet you in the Eighty-sixth Street Subway at seven, so we can catch a Brooklyn express and make it over in thirty minutes."

"Yes."

"But it's raining, Gert. Look out. Honest, I don't like to ask you to break your date to hike over there in the rain with me."

"Raining! Aw, then let's cut it, Phonzie. I got a new marcel and a cold on my chest that weighs a ton. She can't roll it on a wet Sunday, nohow."

"Paper says clear and warm to-morrow, Gert; but, honest, you don't need to go."

"You're a nice boy, Phonzie, and a proud father, but you can't spend my money for me. What you bet I get ten per cent. off for cash? Subway at seven. I'll be there."

"I may be a bit late, Gert. She ain't so strong yet, and after last night I don't want to get her nervous."

"I told you she'd be sore at me for taking you to the Ritz ball last night, and God knows it wasn't no pleasure in my life to go model-hunting with you, when I might have been joy-riding with my friend from Carson City."

"It's just because she ain't herself yet. I'm off, Gert. Till seven in the Subway!"

"Yes, till seven!"

* * * * *

When Mr. Alphonse Michelson unlocked the door of his second-floor five-room apartment, a lamp softly burning through a yellow silk lamp-shade met him with the soft radiance of home. Beside the door he divested himself of his rain-spotted mackintosh, inserted his dripping umbrella in a tall china stand, shook a little rivulet from his hat and hung it on a pair of wall antlers.

"That you, Phonzie?"

"Yes, hon, it's me."

'"Sh-h-h-h!"

He tiptoed down the aisle of hallway and into the soft-lighted front room. From a mound of pillows and sleepy from their luxury Millie Moores rose to his approach, her forefinger placed across her lips and a pale mist of chiffon falling backward from her arms.

What a masseuse is Love! The lines had faded from Millie's face and in their place the grace of tenderness and a roundness where the chin had softened. Years had folded back like petals, revealing the heart and the unwithered bosom of her.

He kissed her, pressing the finger of warning closer against her lips, and she patted a place for him on the Mexican afghan beside her.

"Phonzie!"

"How you feelin', hon?"

"Strong! If it ain't raining to-morrow, I'm going to take him out if I have to carry him in my arms. Say, wouldn't I like to feel myself rolling him in one of them white-enamel, glass-top things like Van Ness has for her last one. Ida May tried three places to get one for us."

"They're made special."

"All my life I've wanted to feel myself wheeling him, Phonzie. I used to dream myself doing it in the old place down on Twenty-third Street, when I used to sit at the sewing-table from eight until eight. Gee! I—honest, I just can't wait to see if the sun is shining to-morrow."

He kissed her again on the back of each finger, and she let her hand, pale and rather inert, rest on his hair.

"Is my boy hungry for his din-din?"

"Gee! yes! The noon appointments came so thick I had to send Eddie out to bring me a bite."

"What kind of a day?"

"Everything smooth but the designing-room. Gert done her best, but they don't take hold without you, hon. They can't even get in their heads that gold charmeuse idea Gert and I swiped at the Ritz last night."

"Did you tell them I'll be back on the job next week, Phonzie?"

"Nothing doing. You're going to stay right here, snug in your rug, another two weeks."

"Rave on, hon, but I got the nurse engaged for Monday. How's the Van

Norder wedding-dress coming?"

"Great! That box train you drew up will float down the aisle after her like a white cobweb. It's a knock-out."

"Say, won't I be glad to get back in harness!"

"You got to take it slow, Mil."

"And ain't you glad it's all over, Phonzie?"

"Am I!"

"Four weeks old to-morrow, and Ida May was over to-day and says she never seen a kid so big for his age."

"He takes after my grandfather—he was six feet two without shoes."

"You ought to seen him to-day laying next to me, Phonzie. He looked up and squinted, dear, for all the world like you."

A bell tinkled. In the frame of a double doorway a seventeen-year-old maid drew back the portières on brass rings that grated. In the room adjoining and beneath a lighted dome of colored glass a table lay spread, uncovered dishes exuding fragrant spirals of steam.

"Supper! Say, ain't it great to have you back at the table again, Mil?"

"Oh, I don't know, the way—the way you went hiking off last night to—to a ball."

"Aw, now, hon, 'ain't you got that out of your system yet? For a girlie with all your good sense, if you ain't the greatest little one to get a silly gix and work it to death."

"I just made a civil remark."

"What was the use wasting that ten-dollar pair of tickets the guy from Carson City gave her, when we could use them and get some tips on some of the imports the women wore?"

"I never said to waste them."

"You know it don't hurt to get around and see what's being worn, hon.

That's our business."

Tears of weakness welled to her eyes and she stooped over her plate to conceal them.

"I'm not saying anything, am I? Only—only it's right lucky she can fill my place so—so well while I—I got to be away awhile."

Her barbed comment only pricked him to happy thought. He made a quick foray into his side pocket. "I brought up one of these pink velvet roses for you to look at, Mil. It's Gert's idea to festoon these underneath the net tunic on McGrath's blue taffeta. See, like that. It's a neat little idea, hon, and Gert had these roses made up in shaded effects like this one. How you like it?"