and Father was a person of stubborn
youthfulness. For something over forty years Mother had been trying to
make him stop smoking, yet every time her back was turned he would sneak
out his amber cigarette-holder and puff a cheap cigarette, winking at
the shocked crochet tidy on the patent rocker. Mother sniffed at him and
said that he acted like a young smart Aleck, but he would merely grin in
answer and coax her out for a walk.

As they paraded, the sun shone through the fuzzy, silver hair that
puffed out round Father's crab-apple face, and an echo of delicate
silver was on Mother's rose-leaf cheeks.

They were rustic as a meadow-ringed orchard, yet Father and Mother had
been born in New York City, and there lived for more than sixty years.
Father was a perfectly able clerk in Pilkings's shoe-store on Sixth
Avenue, and Pilkings was so much older than Father that he still called
him, "Hey you, Seth!" and still gave him advice about handling lady
customers. For three or four years, some ten years back, Father and Mr.
Pilkings had displayed ill-feeling over the passing of the amiable
elastic-sided Congress shoe. But that was practically forgotten, and
Father began to feel fairly certain of his job.

There are three sorts of native New-Yorkers: East Side Jews and
Italians, who will own the city; the sons of families that are so rich
that they swear off taxes; and the people, descendants of shopkeepers
and clerks, who often look like New-Englanders, and always listen with
timid admiration when New-Yorkers from Ohio or Minnesota or California
give them information about the city. To this meek race, doing the
city's work and forgotten by the city they have built, belonged the
Applebys. They lived in a brown and dusky flat, with a tortoise-shell
tabby, and a canary, and a china hen which held their breakfast boiled
eggs. Every Thursday Mother wrote to her daughter, who had married a
prosperous and severely respectable druggist of Saserkopee, New York,
and during the rest of her daytimes she swept and cooked and dusted,
went shyly along the alien streets which had slipped into the
cobblestoned village she had known as a girl, and came back to dust
again and wait for Father's nimble step on the four flights of stairs up
to their flat. She was as used to loneliness as a hotel melancholiac;
the people they had known had drifted away to far suburbs. In each other
the Applebys found all life.

In July, Father began his annual agi