bruary, I been shooed like I was one of our roosters at
home got over in Schlossman's yard. There, you read for me, Izzy; such
language I don't know."

Isadore took up a card and crinkled one eye in a sly wink toward his
mother and sister.

"_Rinderbrust und Kartoffel Salad_, pa, _mit Apful Kuechen und
Kaletraufschnitt._"

"Ya, ya, make fun yet! A square meal like that should happen to me yet
in a highway-robbery place like this."

Mrs. Binswanger straightened her large-bosomed, stiff-corseted figure in
its large-design, black-lace basque, and pulled gently at her daughter's
flesh-colored chiffon sleeve, which fell from her shoulders like angels'
wings.

"Look across the room, Poil. There's Max just coming in the dining-room
with his mother. Always the first thing he looks over at our table. Bow,
Julius; don't you see across the room the Teitlebaums coming in? I guess
old man Teitlebaum is out on the road again."

Miss Binswanger flushed the same delicate pink as her chiffon, and
showed her oval teeth in a vivid smile.

"Ain't he silly, though, to-night, mamma! Look, when he holds up two
fingers at me it means first he takes his mother up to her pinochle
club, and then by nine o'clock he comes back to me."

"How good that woman has got it! Look, Poil, another waist she's wearing
again."

"Look how he pulls out the chair for his mother, Izzy. It would hurt you
to do that for me and mamma, wouldn't it?"

"Say, missy, I learnt manners two years before you ever done anything
but hold down the front porch out on Newton Avenue. I'd been meetin'
Max Teitlebaum and Ignatz Landauer and that crowd over at the Young
Men's Association before you'd ever been to the movie with anybody
except Meena Schlossman."

"I don't see that all your good start got you anywheres."

"Don't let swell society go to your head, missy. You ain't got Max yet,
neither. You ought to be ashamed to be so crazy about a boy. Wait till I
tell you something when we get up-stairs that'll take some of your kink
out, missy."

"Children, children, hush your fussing! Julius, don't read all the names
off the bill of fare."

Miss Binswanger regarded her brother under level brows, and threw him a
retort that sizzed across the table like drops of water on a hot
stove-top.

"Anyways, if I was a fellow that couldn't keep a job more than two
months at a time I'd lay quiet. I wouldn't be out of a job all the time,
and beggin' my father to set me up in b