"

"Don't get it too hot, hon."

"Gee! Lemme straighten up. Say, ain't you a messer, though! Look at this
here wash-stand and those neckties! Ain't you a messer, though, dearie!"

She crammed the ties into a dresser drawer, dragged a chair into place,
removed a small tin can from the wash-stand drawer, hung her hat and
jacket on their peg, and lowered the shade.

MARKED DOWN

Along with radium, parcels post, wireless telegraphy, and orchestral
church music came tight skirts and the hipless movement.

Adolph Katzenstein placed his figurative ear to the ground, heard the
stealthy whisper of soft messalines and clinging charmeuse, and sold out
the Empire Shirt-waist Company for twenty-five hundred dollars at a
slight loss.

Five years later the Katzenstein Neat-Fit Petticoat was flaunted in the
red and white electric lights in the lightest part of Broadway, and the
figure of an ecstatic girl in an elastic-top, charmeuse-ruffled
petticoat had become as much of an epic in street-car advertising as the
flakiest breakfast food or the safest safety razor.

Then the Katzensteins moved from a simplex to a complex apartment,
furnished the dining-room in Flemish oak and the bedroom in white
mahogany; Mrs. Katzenstein telephoned to her fancy grocer's for
artichokes instead of buying cabbages from the street-vender, and Mr.
Katzenstein walked with the four fingers of each hand thrust into the
distended front pockets of his trousers.

On the first Tuesday of each month Mrs. Katzenstein entertained at
whist--an antediluvian survival of a bridgeless era.

At eight o'clock in the morning of one of these first Tuesdays she
entered her daughter's white-mahogany bedroom, raised the shades with a
clatter, and drew back the curtains.

"Birdie, get up! It's late, and we got house-cleaning this morning.
Papa's been gone already an hour."

The pink-and-white flowered comforter on the bed stirred, and two plump
arms, with frills of lace falling backward, raised up like sturdy
monoliths in the stretch that accompanies a yawn.

"Aw--yaw--yaw--mamma! Can't you let a girl sleep after she's been up
late? Tell Tillie she should begin her sweeping in the hall."

"I should know what time you got home last night. You sneak in like you
was afraid it would give me some pleasure to wake up and hear about it!
Who was there? What did Marcus have to say?"

"Aw, mamma, let me sleep--can't you? I'll get up in a minute."

"So close-mout