to stick to them dark, winy shades, Mrs. C. With your
coloring and black hair and eyes, they bring you out like a Gipsy. Never
seen you look better than at the Y. M. H. A. entertainment."

Quick color flowed down her open throat and into her shirtwaist. It was
as if the platitude merged with the very corpuscles of a blush that sank
down into thirsty soil.

"You boys," she said, "come out here and throw in a jolly with every
bill of goods. I'll take a good fat discount instead."

"Fact. Never seen you look better. When you got out on the floor in that
stamp-your-foot kind of dance with old man Shulof, your hand on your hip
and your head jerking it up, there wasn't a girl on the floor, your own
daughter included, could touch you, and I'm giving it to you straight."

"That old thing! It's a Russian folk-dance my mother taught me the first
year we were in this country. I was three years old then, and, when she
got just crazy with homesickness, we used to dance it to each other
evenings on the kitchen floor."

"Say, have you heard the news?"

"No."

"Guess."

"Can't."

"Hammerstein is bringing over the crowned heads of Europe for
vaudeville."

Mrs. Coblenz moved back a step, her mouth falling open.

"Why--Milton Bauer--in the old country a man could be strung up for
saying less than that!"

"That didn't get across. Try another. A Frenchman and his wife were
traveling in Russia, and--"

"If--if you had an old mother like mine upstairs, Milton, eating out her
heart and her days and her weeks and her months over a husband's grave
somewhere in Siberia and a son's grave somewhere in Kishinef, you
wouldn't see the joke, neither."

Mr. Bauer executed a self-administered pat sharply against the back of
his hand.

"Keeper," he said, "put me in the brain-ward. I--I'm sorry, Mrs. C., so
help me! Didn't mean to. How is your mother, Mrs. C.? Seems to me, at
the dance the other night, Selene said she was fine and dandy."

"Selene ain't the best judge of her poor old grandmother. It's hard for
a young girl to have patience for old age sitting and chewing all day
over the past. It's right pitiful the way her grandmother knows it, too,
and makes herself talk English all the time to please the child and
tries to perk up for her. Selene, thank God, ain't suffered, and can't
sympathize!"

"What's ailing her, Mrs. C.? I kinda miss seeing the old lady sitting
down here in the store."

"It's the last year or so, Milt. Jus