en
clutching himself there as if he had caught the impulse on the fly, "I
just wish I could help."

"Oh!" she said, and threw up a swift brown look from the lace making and
then at it again.

He laughed, but from nervousness.

"My little mother was an ailer, too."

"That's me, Mr. Latz. Not sick--just ailing. I always say that it's
ridiculous that a woman in such perfect health as I am should be such a
sufferer."

"Same with her and her joints."

"Why, except for this old neuralgia, I can outdo Alma when it comes
to dancing down in the grill with the young people of an evening, or
shopping."

"More like sisters than any mother and daughter I ever saw."

"Mother and daughter, but which is which from the back, some of my
friends put it," said Mrs. Samstag, not without a curve to her voice;
then, hastily: "But the best child, Mr. Latz. The best that ever lived.
A regular little mother to me in my spells."

"Nice girl, Alma."

"It snowed so the day of--my husband's funeral. Why, do you know that up
to then I never had an attack of neuralgia in my life. Didn't even know
what a headache was. That long drive. That windy hilltop with two men to
keep me from jumping into the grave after him. Ask Alma. That's how I
care when I care. But, of course, as the saying is, 'time heals.' But
that's how I got my first attack. 'Intenseness' is what the doctors
called it. I'm terribly intense."

"I--guess when a woman like you--cares like--you--cared, it's not much
use hoping you would ever--care again. That's about the way of it, isn't
it?"

If he had known it, there was something about his intensity of
expression to inspire mirth. His eyebrows lifted to little Gothic arches
of anxiety, a rash of tiny perspiration broke out over his blue shaved
face, and as he sat on the edge of his chair it seemed that inevitably
the tight sausagelike knees must push their way through mere fabric.

Ordinarily he presented the slightly bay-windowed, bay-rummed, spatted,
and somewhat jowled well-being of the Wall Street bachelor who is a
musical-comedy first-nighter, can dig the meat out of the lobster claw
whole, takes his beefsteak rare and with two or three condiments, and
wears his elk's tooth dangling from his waistcoat pocket and mounted on
a band of platinum and tiny diamonds.

Mothers of debutantes were by no means unamiably disposed toward him,
but the debutantes themselves slithered away like slim-flanked minnows.

It was rumo