. She was almost handsome in them, the unwonted flush of excitement
colouring her cheeks, brightening her eyes.

The next day Hugo came home with a new hat for his mother, a four-pound
steak, and the announcement that he was going to take music lessons. A
new era had begun in the life of Ma Mandle.

Two people, no matter how far apart in years or tastes, cannot struggle
side by side, like that, in a common cause, without forging between them
a bond indissoluble. Hugo, at twenty-eight, had the serious mien of a
man of forty. At forty he was to revert to his slighted twenty-eight,
but he did not know that then. His music lessons were his one protest
against a beauty-starved youth. He played rather surprisingly well the
cheap music of the day, waggling his head (already threatening baldness)
in a professional vaudeville manner and squinting up through his cigar
smoke, happily. His mother, seated in the room, sewing, would say, "Play
that again, Hugo. That's beautiful. What's the name of that?" He would
tell her, for the dozenth time, and play it over, she humming, off-key,
in his wake. The relation between them was more than that of mother and
son. It was a complex thing that had in it something conjugal. When Hugo
kissed his mother with a resounding smack and assured her that she
looked like a kid she would push him away with little futile shoves, pat
her hair into place, and pretend annoyance. "Go away, you big rough
thing!" she would cry. But all unconsciously she got from it a thrill
that her husband's withered kisses had never given her.

Twelve years had passed since Etta's marriage. Hugo's salary was a
comfortable thing now, even in these days of soaring prices. The habit
of economy, so long a necessity, had become almost a vice in old lady
Mandle. Hugo, with the elasticity of younger years, learned to spend
freely, but his mother's thrift and shrewdness automatically swelled his
savings. When he was on the road, as he sometimes was for weeks at a
time, she spent only a tithe of the generous sum he left with her. She
and Anna ate those sketchy meals that obtain in a manless household.
When Hugo was home the table was abundant and even choice, though Ma
Mandle often went blocks out of her way to save three cents on a bunch
of new beets. So strong is usage. She would no more have wasted his
money than she would have knifed him in the dark. She ran the household
capably, but her way was the old-fashioned way. Sometime