rvations let me steer you. I got a cousin works
down at the White Flag offices--Harry Mansbach. He'll fix you up if
there ain't a room left on the boat. He's the greatest little fixer you
ever seen."

"Ach, Mr. Shapiro, how grand! To-morrow, Miriam, maybe when you get the
berths--"

"State-rooms, mamma."

"State-rooms, maybe Mr. Shapiro will--will go mit."

"Aw, mamma, he--"

"Will I! Well, I guess!"

Across the table their eyes met and held.

* * * * *

Even into the granite canon of lower Broadway spring can find a way.
In the fifty-first story of the latest triumph in skyscraping a
six-dollar-a-week stenographer filled her drinking-tumbler with water
and placed it, with two pansies floating atop, beside her typewriting
machine. In Wall Street an apple-woman with the most ancient face in the
world leaned out of her doorway with a new offering, forced but firm
strawberries that caught a backward glance from the passing tide of
finders and keepers, losers and weepers. Two sparrows hopped in and out
among the stone gargoyles of a municipal building. A dray-driver cursed
at the snarl of traffic and flecked the first sweat from his horse's
flanks. A gaily striped awning drooped across the front of the White
Flag steamship offices, and out from its entrance, spring in her face,
emerged Miss Miriam Binswanger; at her shoulder Irving Shapiro attended.

"Honest, Mr. Shapiro, I--I just don't know what I would have done except
for you."

"I told you Harry Mansbach would fix you up."

She clasped her wrist-bag carefully over the bulk of a thick envelope
and turned her shining face full upon him.

"On deck A, too, right with the best!"

He steered her by a light pressure of her arm into the up-town flux of
the sidewalk. "If I was a right smart kind of a fellow I never would
have helped you to get those cabins."

"Oh, Mr. Shapiro!"

"But that's me every time, always working against myself."

"Well, of all the nerve!" And her voice would belie that she knew his
delicate portent.

"If not for me, maybe you couldn't have gotten those reservations and
you would have to stay at home. That's where I would come in, see?"

"Well, of all things!"

"But that's me every time. Meet a girl one day, take a fancy to her, and
off she sails for Europe the next."

"Honest, Mr. Shapiro, you're just the limit!" She would have no more
hold of his arm, but at the next Subway hood paused in the ac