ag in quick olfactory analysis.
"Eight ninety-eight an ounce." Her nose crawling up to what he thought
the cunning perfection of a sniff.

"Used to it from home--not? She is not. Believe me, I knew Max Gronauer
when he first started in the produce business in Jersey City and the
only perfume he had was seventeen cents a pound, not always fresh killed
at that. Cold storage _de printemps_."

"Max Gronauer died just two months after my husband," said Mrs. Samstag,
tucking away into her beaded hand-bag her _filet_ lace handkerchief,
itself guilty of a not inexpensive attar.

"_Thu-thu_," clucked Mr. Latz for want of a fitting retort.

"Heigh-ho! I always say we have so little in common, me and Mrs.
Gronauer. She revokes so in bridge, and I think it's terrible for a
grandmother to blondine so red; but we've both been widows for almost
eight years. Eight years," repeated Mrs. Samstag on a small scented
sigh.

He was inordinately sensitive to these allusions, reddening and wanting
to seem appropriate.

"Poor, poor little woman!"

"Heigh-ho," she said, and again, "Heigh-ho."

It was about the eyes that Mrs. Samstag showed most plainly whatever
inroads into her clay the years might have gained. There were little
dark areas beneath them like smeared charcoal and two unrelenting sacs
that threatened to become pouchy.

Their effect was not so much one of years, but they gave Mrs. Samstag,
in spite of the only slightly plump and really passable figure, the look
of one out of health.

What ailed her was hardly organic. She was the victim of periodic and
raging neuralgic fires that could sweep the right side of her head and
down into her shoulder blade with a great crackling and blazing of
nerves. It was not unusual for her daughter Alma to sit up the one or
two nights that it could endure, unfailing, through the wee hours, with
hot applications.

For a week sometimes, these attacks heralded their comings with little
jabs, like the pricks of an exploring needle. Then the under-eyes began
to look their muddiest. They were darkening now and she put up two
fingers with little pressing movement to her temple.

"You're a great little woman," reiterated Mr. Latz, rather riveting even
Mrs. Samstag's suspicion that here was no great stickler for variety of
expression.

"And a great sufferer, too," he said, noting the pressing fingers.

She colored under this delightful impeachment.

"I wouldn't wish one of my neuralgia spe