sliding the last three steps, teetered in
bare arm-in-arm groups, swapping persiflage with pimply,
patent-leather-haired young men who were full of nervous excitement and
eager to excel in return badinage.

Bell hops scurried with folding tables. Bridge games formed.

The theater group got off, so to speak. Showy women and show-off men.
Mrs. Gronauer, in a full-length mink coat that enveloped her like a
squaw, a titillation of diamond aigrettes in her Titianed hair, and an
aftermath of scent as tangible as the trail of a wounded shark, emerged
from the elevator with her son and daughter-in-law.

"Foi!" said Mr. Latz, by way of somewhat unduly, perhaps, expressing his
own kind of cognizance of the scented trail.

"_Fleur de printemps_," said Mrs. Samstag, in quick olfactory analysis.
"Eight-ninety-eight an ounce." Her nose crawling up to what he thought
the cunning perfection of a sniff.

"Used to it from home--not? She is not. Believe me, I knew Max Gronauer
when he first started in the produce business in Jersey City and the
only perfume he had was at seventeen cents a pound and not always fresh
killed at that. _Cold storage de printemps_!"

"Max Gronauer died just two months after my husband," said Mrs. Samstag,
tucking away into her beaded handbag her filet-lace handkerchief, itself
guilty of a not inexpensive attar.

"Thu-thu!" clucked Mr. Latz for want of a fitting retort.

"Heigh-ho! I always say we have so little in common, me and Mrs.
Gronauer, she revokes so in bridge, and I think it's terrible for a
grandmother to blondine so red, but we've both been widows for almost
eight years. Eight years," repeated Mrs. Samstag on a small, scented
sigh.

He was inordinately sensitive to these allusions, reddening and wanting
to seem appropriate.

"Poor little woman, you've had your share of trouble."

"Share," she repeated, swallowing a gulp and pressing the line of her
eyebrows as if her thoughts were sobbing. "I--It's as I tell Alma,
Mr. Latz, sometimes I think I've had three times my share. My one
consolation is that I try to make the best of it. That's my motto in
life, 'Keep a bold front.'"

For the life of him, all he could find to convey to her the bleeding
quality of his sympathy was, "Poor, poor little woman!"

"Heigh-ho!" she said, and again, "Heigh-ho!"

There was quite a nape to her neck. He could see it where the carefully
trimmed brown hair left it for a rise to skillful coiffure, and what