! _Ach_,
Yetta, why should I leave that boy? You can believe me when I tell you
that not one night except when he was took in at the lodge--not one
night since poor papa died--has that boy left me at home alone. Not one
step will he take without me."

"Aw, mamma!"

"Sometimes I say, 'Abie, go out like other boys and see the girls.' But
he thinks if he ain't home to fix the windows and the covers for my
rheumatism it ain't right. Yes; believe me, when your children ain't
feeling well it's worry enough."

"Aw, maw, I can take you up to the Washeims' if you want to go."

"You ought to hear him in there, Yetta--fussing because I want to keep
him laying down. Yes, I go with you; to-morrow at nine I meet you down
by Fulton Street. Up round here they're forty-two cents. Ain't it so?
And I used two whites and a yolk in my pie-dough. Yes; I hope so too. If
not I call a doctor. Nine o'clock! Good-by, Yetta."

"Maw, for me you shouldn't stay home."

Mrs. Ginsburg flopped into a rocker beside the flowered velvet couch.

"A little broth, Abie?"

"No."

"When you don't eat it's something wrong."

"You needn't fan me, mamma--I ain't hot now."

Insidious darkness crept into the room like a cool hand descending on
the feverish brow of day; the red glow shifted farther along the mantel
and lay vivid as blood across the blue vase and the photograph of a
grizzled head in a seashell frame. Mrs. Ginsburg rocked over a loose
board in the floor and waved a palm-leaf fan toward the reclining shadow
of her son until he could taste its tape-bound edge.

"Next week to-night five years since we lost poor papa, Abie--five
years! _Gott!_ When I think of it! Just like his picture he looked up to
the last, too--just like his picture."

"Yes, mamma."

"I ain't so spry as I used to be, neither, Abie--or, believe me, I would
never let you take on a clerk. Sometimes I think, when the rheumatism
gets up round my heart, it won't be long as I go too. Poor papa! If I
could have gone with him! How he always hated to go alone to places! To
the barber he hated to go, till I got so I could cut it myself."

"Mamma, you ain't got nothing to worry about."

"I worry enough."

"You can take it as easy as you want to now--I even want we should have
a better apartment. We got the best little business between here and One
Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street! If poor papa could see it now he
wouldn't know it from five years ago. Poor papa! He wasn't willi