to dinner she
turned me down. Good looking, too. She's coming in again to-morrow for
novelties."

Ma Mandle didn't even recall hearing her name until the knife descended.
Hugo played the piano a great deal all that week, after dinner.
Sentimental things, with a minor wail in the chorus. Smoked a good deal,
too. Twice he spent a full hour in dressing, whistling absent-mindedly
during the process and leaving his necktie rack looking like a nest of
angry pythons when he went out, without saying where he was going. The
following week he didn't touch the piano and took long walks in
Washington Park, alone, after ten. He seemed uninterested in his meals.
Usually he praised this dish, or that.

"How do you like the blueberry pie, Hugo?"

"'S all right." And declined a second piece.

The third week he went West on business. When he came home he dropped
his bag in the hall, strode into his mother's bedroom, and stood before
her like a schoolboy. "Lil and I are going to be married," he said.

Ma Mandle had looked up at him, her face a blank. "Lil?"

"Sure. I told you all about her." He hadn't. He had merely thought about
her, for three weeks, to the exclusion of everything else. "Ma, you'll
love her. She knows all about you. She's the grandest girl in the world.
Say, I don't know why she ever fell for a dub like me. Well, don't look
so stunned. I guess you kind of suspicioned, huh?"

"But who--?"

"I never thought she'd look at me. Earned her own good salary, and
strictly business, but she's a real woman. Says she wants her own home
an--'n everything. Says every normal woman does. Says--"

Ad lib.

They were married the following month.

Hugo sub-leased the flat on South Park and took an eight-room apartment
farther east. Ma Mandle's red and green plush parlour pieces, and her
mahogany rockers, and her rubber plant, and the fern, and the can of
grapefruit pits that she and Anna had planted and that had come up,
miraculously, in the form of shiny, thick little green leaves, all were
swept away in the upheaval that followed. Gone, too, was Polish Anna,
with her damp calico and her ubiquitous pail and dripping rag and her
gutturals. In her place was a trim Swede who wore white kid shoes in the
afternoon and gray dresses and cob-web aprons. The sight of the neat
Swede sitting in her room at two-thirty in the afternoon, tatting, never
failed to fill Ma Mandle with a dumb fury. Anna had been an all-day
scrubber.

But L