port and the time the government
issued it to him, y'understand, it would already be the spring and
summer season of nineteen-twenty-four and nineteen-twenty-five. So the
best thing we could do is to snoop round among the trade, and whatever
we find the majority is making up for next year, we would make up the
same styles also, and that's all there would be _to_ it."

"We wouldn't do nothing of the kind," Abe declared. "I've been thinking
this thing over, and I come to the conclusion that it's up to you to go
over to Paris and see what is going on over there."

"I don't got to go to Paris for that, Abe," Morris said. "I can read the
papers the same like anybody else, and just so long as there is a chance
that the war would start up again and them hundred-mile guns is going to
resume operations, I am content to get my ideas of Paris styles at a
distance of three thousand miles if I never sold another garment as long
as I live."

"But when it _was_ working yet, it only went off every twenty minutes,"
Abe said.

"I don't care if it went off every Fourth of July," Morris said,
"because if I went over there it would be just my luck that the peace
nogotiations falls through and the Germans invent a gun leaving
Frankfort ever hour on the hour and arriving in Paris daily, including
Sundays, without leaving enough trace of me to file a proof of death
with. Am I right or wrong?"

"All right," Abe said. "If _that's_ the way you feel about it, _I_ will
go to Paris."

"_You_ will go to Paris?" Morris exclaimed.

"Sure!" Abe declared. "The operators is on strike, business is rotten,
and I'm sick and tired of paying life-insurance premiums, _anyway_.
Besides, if Leon Sammet could get a passport, why couldn't I?"

"You mean to say that faker is going to Paris to buy model gowns?"
Morris demanded.

"I seen him on the Subway this morning, and the way he talked about how
easy he got his passport, you would think that every time he was in
Washington with a line of them masquerade costumes which Sammet Brothers
makes up, if he didn't stop in and take anyhow a bit of lunch with the
Wilsons, y'understand, the President raises the devil with Tumulty why
didn't he let him _know_ Leon Sammet was in town."

"Then that settles it," Morris declared, reaching for his hat.

"Where are you going?" Abe asked.

"I am going straight down to see Henry D. Feldman and tell that crook he
should get for me a passport," Morris said.

"You woul