?"

"My baby! It's like I can't realize it. So young!"

"He took the measure of my finger, mamma, with a piece of string. A
diamond, he says, not too flashy, but neat."

"We have 'em, and we suffer for 'em, and we lose 'em."

"He's going to trade in the flivver for a chummy roadster, and--"

"Oh, darling, it's like I can't bear it!"

At that, Miss Coblenz sat back on her tall wooden heels, mauve spats
crinkling.

"Well, you're a merry little future mother-in-law, momsie."

"It ain't that, baby. I'm happy that my girl has got herself up in the
world with a fine upright boy like Lester; only--you can't understand,
babe, till you've got something of your own flesh and blood that belongs
to you, that I--I couldn't feel anything except that a piece of my heart
was going if--if it was a king you was marrying."

"Now, momsie, it's not like I was moving a thousand miles away. You can
be glad I don't have to go far, to New York or to Cleveland, like Alma
Yawitz."

"I am! I am!"

"Uncle--Uncle Mark, I guess, will furnish us up like he did Leon and
Irma--only, I don't want mahogany--I want Circassian walnut. He gave
them their flat-silver, too, Puritan design, for an engagement present.
Think of it, mamma, me having that stuck-up Irma Sinsheimer for a
relation! It always made her sore when I got chums with Amy at school
and got my nose in it with the Acme crowd, and--and she'll change her
tune now, I guess, me marrying her husband's second cousin."

"Didn't Lester want to--to come in for a while, Selene, to--to see--me?"

Sitting there on her heels, Miss Coblenz looked away, answering with her
face in profile.

"Yes; only--I--well if you want to know it, mamma, it's no fun for a
girl to bring a boy like Lester up here in--in this crazy room all hung
up with gramaw's wreaths and half the time her sitting out there in the
dark looking in at us through the door and talking to herself."

"Gramaw's an old--"

"Is--it any wonder I'm down at Amy's half the time. How--do you think a
girl feels to have gramaw keep hanging onto that old black wig of hers
and not letting me take the crayons or wreaths down off the wall. In
Lester's crowd, they don't know--nothing about Revolutionary stuff
and--and persecutions. Amy's grandmother don't even talk with an accent,
and Lester says his grandmother came from Alsace-Lorraine. That's
French. They think only tailors and old-clothes men and--"

"Selene!"

"Well, they do. You--you