her boarders got to let their mouth water and look at it?"

"You think it don't hurt like a knife! For myself I don't mind, but my
Irving! How that child loves 'em, and he should got to sit at the same
table without cranberries."

From the head of the table the flashing implements of carving held in
askance for stroke, her lips lifted to a smile and a simulation of interest
for display of further carnivorous appetites, Mrs. Kaufman passed her nod
from one to the other.

"Miss Arndt, little more? No? Mr. Krakower? Gravy? Mrs. Suss? Mr. Suss?
So! Simon? Mr. Schloss? Miss Horowitz? Mr. Vetsburg, let me give you this
little tender--No? Then, Ruby, here let mama give you just a little
more--"

"No, no, mama, please!" She caught at the hovering wrist to spare the
descent of the knife.

By one of those rare atavisms by which a poet can be bred of a peasant
or peasant be begot of poet, Miss Ruby Kaufman, who was born in Newark,
posthumous, to a terrified little parent with a black ribbon at the throat
of her gown, had brought with her from no telling where the sultry eyes and
tropical-turned skin of spice-kissed winds. The corpuscles of a shah
might have been running in the blood of her, yet Simon Kaufman, and Simon
Kaufman's father before him, had sold wool remnants to cap-factories on
commission.

"Ruby, you don't eat enough to keep a bird alive. Ain't it a shame, Mr.
Vetsburg, a girl should be so dainty?"

Mr. Meyer Vetsburg cast a beetling glance down upon Miss Kaufman, there so
small beside him, and tinked peremptorily against her plate three times
with his fork. "Eat, young lady, like your mama wants you should, or, by
golly! I'll string you up for my watch-fob--not, Mrs. Kaufman?"

A smile lay under Mr. Vetsburg's gray-and-black mustache. Gray were his
eyes, too, and his suit, a comfortable baggy suit with the slouch of the
wearer impressed into it, the coat hiking center back, the pocket-flaps
half in, half out, and the knees sagging out of press.

"That's right, Mr. Vetsburg, you should scold her when she don't eat."

Above the black-bombazine basque, so pleasantly relieved at the throat by a
V of fresh white net, a wave of color moved up Mrs. Kaufman's face into her
architectural coiffure, the very black and very coarse skein of her hair
wound into a large loose mound directly atop her head and pierced there
with a ball-topped comb of another decade.

"I always say, Mr. Vetsburg, she minds you before she m