why I was so anxious to make it up
to her. Y'understand?"

"Yes--Loo."

"But you saw that mink coat? Well, my little mother, three years before
she died, was wearing one like that in sable. Real Russian. Set me back
eighteen thousand, wholesale, and she never knew different than that it
cost eighteen hundred. Proudest moment of my life when I helped my
little old mother into her own automobile in that sable coat."

"I had some friends lived in the Grenoble Apartments when you did--the
Adelbergs. They used to tell me how it hung right down to her heels and
she never got into the auto that she didn't pick it up so as not to sit
on it."

"That there coat is packed away in cold storage, now, Carrie, waiting,
without me exactly knowing why, I guess, for--the one little woman in
the world besides her I would let so much as touch its hem."

Mrs. Samstag's lips parted, her teeth showing through like light.

"Oh," she said, "sable. That's my fur, Loo. I've never owned any, but
ask Alma if I don't stop to look at it in every show window. Sable!"

"Carrie--would you--could you--I'm not what you would call a youngster
in years, I guess, but forty-four ain't--"

"I'm--forty-one, Louis. A man like you could have younger."

"No. That's what I don't want. In my lonesomeness, after my mother's
death, I thought once that maybe a young girl from the West, nice girl
with her mother from Ohio--but I--funny thing, now I come to think about
it--I never once mentioned my little mother's sable coat to her. I
couldn't have satisfied a young girl like that or her me, Carrie, any
more than I could satisfy Alma. It was one of those mama-made matches
that we got into because we couldn't help it and out of it before it was
too late. No, no, Carrie, what I want is a woman near to my own age."

"Loo, I--I couldn't start in with you even with the one little lie that
gives every woman a right to be a liar. I'm forty-three, Louis--nearer
to forty-four. You're not mad, Loo?"

"God love it! If that ain't a little woman for you! Mad? Just doing that
little thing with me raises your stock fifty per cent."

"I'm--that way."

"We're a lot alike, Carrie. At heart, I'm a home man, Carrie, and unless
I'm pretty much off my guess, you are, too--I mean a home woman. Right?"

"Me all over, Loo. Ask Alma if--"

"I've got the means, too, Carrie, to give a woman a home to be proud
of."

"Just for fun, ask Alma, Loo, if one year since her father's deat