ucky he is he should have a pink birthday-cake!
Uh--uh--uh! Don't you begin to holler again--Here, I'm putting the
feedle next to you--uh--uh--uh!"

To a meal plentifully ladled out directly from stove to table, the
Kantor family drew up, dipping first into the rich black soup of the
occasion. All except Mrs. Kantor.

"Esther, you dish up; I'm going somewhere. I'll be back in a minute."

"Where you going, Sarah? Won't it keep until--"

But even in the face of query, Sarah Kantor was two flights down and
well through the lambent aisles of the copper shop. Outside, she broke
into a run, through two blocks of the indescribable bazaar atmosphere of
Grand Street, then one block to the right.

Before Naftel's show-window, a jet of bright gas burned into a
jibberwock land of toys. There was that in Sarah Kantor's face that was
actually lyrical, as, fumbling at the bosom of her dress, she entered.

To Leon Kantor, by who knows what symphonic scheme of things, life was a
chromatic scale, yielding up to him through throbbing, living nerves of
sheep-gut, the sheerest semitones of man's emotions.

When he tucked his Stradivarius beneath his chin, the Book of Life
seemed suddenly translated to him in melody. Even Sarah Kantor, who
still brewed for him, on a small portable stove carried from city to
city and surreptitiously unpacked in hotel suites, the blackest of
soups, and, despite his protestation, would incase his ears of nights in
an old home-made device against their flightiness, would often times
bleed inwardly at this sense of his isolation.

There was a realm into which he went alone, leaving her as detached as
the merest ticket purchaser at the box-office.

At seventeen, Leon Kantor had played before the crowned heads of Europe,
the aching heads of American capital, and even the shaved head of a
South Sea prince. There was a layout of anecdotal gifts, from the molar
tooth of the South Sea prince set in a South Sea pearl to a
blue-enamelled snuff-box encrusted with the rearing-lion coat of arms of
a very royal house.

At eighteen, came the purchase of a king's Stradivarius for a king's
ransom, and acclaimed by Sunday supplements to repose of nights in an
ivory cradle.

At nineteen, under careful auspices of press-agent, the ten singing
digits of the son of Abrahm Kantor were insured at ten thousand dollars
the finger.

At twenty, he had emerged surely and safely from the perilous quicksands
which have sucked