Five minutes later the basement door banged and Sam jumped to his feet.
With the agility of a man half his age he ran upstairs to the parlour
floor and put on his hat and coat; and by the time Babette had turned
the corner of Lenox Avenue Sam walked out of the areaway of his
old-fashioned, three-story-and-basement, high-stoop residence on One
Hundred and Eighteenth Street en route for Mrs. Schrimm's equally
old-fashioned residence on One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street. There
he descended the area steps; and finding the door ajar he walked into
the basement dining-room.

"_Wie gehts_, Mrs. Schrimm!" he cried cheerfully.

"Oo-ee! What a _Schreck_ you are giving me!" Mrs. Schrimm exclaimed.
"This is Sam Gembitz, ain't it?"

"Sure it is," Sam replied. "Ain't you afraid somebody is going to come
in and steal something on you?"

"That's that girl again!" Mrs. Schrimm said as she bustled out to the
areaway and slammed the door. "That's one of them _Ungarischer_ girls,
Mr. Gembitz, which all they could do is to eat up your whole ice-box
empty and go out dancing on _Bauern_ balls till all hours of the
morning. Housework is something they don't know nothing about at all.
Well, Mr. Gembitz, I am hearing such tales about you--you are dying,
and so on."

"_Warum_ Mister Gembitz?" Sam said. "Ain't you always called me Sam,
Henrietta?"

Mrs. Schrimm blushed. In the lifetime of the late Mrs. Gembitz she had
been a constant visitor at the Gembitz house, but under Babette's
chilling influence the friendship had withered until it was only a
memory.

"Why not?" she said. "I certainly know you long enough, Sam."

"Going on thirty-five years, Henrietta," Sam said, "when you and me and
Regina come over here together. Things is very different nowadays,
Henrietta. Me, I am an old man already."

"What do you mean old?" Mrs. Schrimm cried. "When my _Grossvater selig_
was sixty-eight he gets married for the third time yet."

"Them old-timers was a different proposition entirely, Henrietta," Sam
said. "If I would be talking about getting married, Henrietta, the
least that happens to me is my children would put me in a lunatic
asylum yet."

"Yow!" Mrs. Schrimm murmured skeptically.

"Wouldn't they?" Sam continued. "Well, you could just bet your life
they would. Why, I am sick only a couple weeks or so, Henrietta, and
what do them boys do? They practically throw me out of my business yet
and tell me I am retired."

"And you let