ol, she pushes on me. I got
to get educated yet!"

Mrs. Ginsburg rocked and fanned rhythmically; her unsubtle lips curled
upward with the subtle smile of a zingaro. The placidity of peace on a
mountain-top, shade in a dell, and love in a garden crept into her
tones.

"I just want you to know I don't stand in your way, Abie. You ain't a
child no more; but while I'm here you got so good a home as you
want--not?"

"Sure!"

"Girls you can always get--not? Girls nowadays ain't what they used to
be neither. I'd like to see a girl do to-day for papa what I did--how I
was in the store and kitchen all at once; then we didn't have no
satin-shoe clerks! Girls ain't what they used to be; in my day
working-girls had no time for fine-smelling cologne-water and--"

"All girls ain't alike, mamma--satin shoes cost no more nowadays as
leather. We got a dollar-ninety-eight satin pump, you wouldn't believe
it--and such a seller! All girls ain't alike, mamma."

"What you mean, Abie?"

Mr. Ginsburg turned on the couch so that his face was close to the wall,
and his voice half lost in the curve of his arm.

"Well, once in a while you come across a girl that ain't--ain't like the
rest of 'em. Well, there ought to be girls that ain't like the rest of
'em, oughtn't there?"

Mrs. Ginsburg's rocking and fanning slowed down a bit; a curious moment
fell over the little room; a nerve-tingling quiescence that in its
pregnant moment can race the mind back over an eternity--a silence that
is cold with sweat, like the second when a doctor removes his
stethoscope from over a patient's left breast and looks at him with a
film of pity glazing his eyes.

"What you mean, Abie? Tell mamma what you mean. I ain't the one to stand
in your light." Mrs. Ginsburg's speech clogged in her throat.

"You know you always got a home with me, mamma. You know, no matter what
comes, I always got to tuck you in bed at night and fix the windows for
you. You know you always got with me the best kind of a home I got to
give you. Ain't it?"

His hand crept out and rested lightly--ever so lightly--on his mother's
knee.

"Abie, you never talked like this before--I won't stand in your way,
Abie. If you can make up your mind, Beulah Washeim or Hannah Rosenblatt,
either would be--"

"Aw, mamma, it ain't them."

Mrs. Ginsburg's hand closed tightly over her son's; a train swooped past
and created a flurry of warm breeze in the room.

"Who--is--it, Abie? Don't be a