of Jacob Golnik. "Do you got trouble
with your designer again?"

Birsky shrugged his shoulders.

"Who ain't got trouble _mit_ a designer, Mr. Feigenbaum?" he asked.
"And the better the designer, y'understand, the more you got trouble
_mit_ him. Actually, Mr. Feigenbaum, you wouldn't believe the nerve
that feller Golnik is got it. If we wouldn't sit on him all the time,
understand me, he tries to run our business for us. Nothing is too much
that he asks us we should do for him."

Feigenbaum pawed the air with his right hand and sat down ponderously.

"You ain't got nothing on me, Birsky," he said. "Honestly, if you would
be running a drygoods store--and especially a chain of drygoods stores
like I got it, understand me--every saleswoman acts like a designer,
only worser yet. Do you know what is the latest craze with them girls?"

He emitted a tremulous sigh before answering his own rhetorical
question.

"Welfare work!" he continued. "Restrooms and lunchrooms, _mit_ a
trained nurse and _Gott weiss was noch_! Did you ever hear the like,
Birsky?--I should go to work and give them girls a restroom! I says to
Miss McGivney, my store superintendent in Cordova, I says: 'If the
girls wants to rest,' I says, 'they should go home,' I says. 'Here we
pay 'em to work, not to rest,' I says."

He paused for breath and wiped away an indignant moisture from his
forehead.

"In my Bridgetown store they ain't kicking at all," he went on; "_aber_
in my Cordova store--that's different again. There I got that
_meshugganeh_ Eschenbach to deal with; which, considering the monkey
business which goes on in that feller's place, y'understand, it's a
wonder to me that they got any time to attend to business at all. Two
people he's got working for him there--a man and a woman--which does
nothing but look after this here welfare _Naerrischkeit_."

"Go away!" Birsky exclaimed. "You don't say so!"

"The man used to was a _Spieler_ from baseball," Feigenbaum continued;
"and him and Eschenbach fixes up a ball team from the clerks and
delivery-wagon drivers, which they could lick even a lot of loafers
which makes a business of baseball already."

Birsky waggled his head from side to side and made incoherent sounds
through his nose by way of expressing his sympathy.

"And yet," Feigenbaum continued, "with all Eschenbach's craziness about
baseball and charities, Birsky, he does a big business there in
Cordova, which I wish I could say the same