"You ain't mad at mama, baby? It's for your own good as much as mine. It is unnatural a mother should want to see her--"
"No, no, mama. Move, dearie. Let me pull down the bed. There you are. Now!"
With a wrench Mrs. Kaufman threw off her recurring inclination to tears, moving casually through the processes of their retirement.
"To-morrow, baby, I tighten the buttons on them new spats. How pretty they look."
"I told Mrs. Katz to-day right out her Irving can't bring any more his bicycle through my front hall. Wasn't I right?"
"Miss Flora looked right nice in that pink waist to-night--not? Four-eighty-nine only, at Gimp's sale."
"You get in bed first, baby, and let mama turn out the lights."
In her white slip of a nightdress, her coronet braids unwound and falling down each shoulder, even her slightness had waned. She was like Juliet who at fourteen had eyes of maid and martyr.
They crept into bed, grateful for darkness.
The flute had died out, leaving a silence that was plaintive.
"Yes, ma." And she snuggled down into the curve of her mother's arm. "Are you, mommy?"
Lying there, with her face upturned and her eyes closed, a stream of quiet tears found their way from under Miss Kaufman's closed lids, running down and toward her ears like spectacle frames.
An hour ticked past, and two damp pools had formed on her pillow.
"I--thought it sounded like you was crying."
"Why, mommy, 'course not! Turn over now and go to sleep."
Another hour, and suddenly Mrs. Kaufman shot out her arm from the coverlet, jerking back the sheet and feeling for her daughter's dewy, upturned face where the tears were slashing down it.
"Oh, my darling, like I didn't suspicion it!"
"You got, Ruby, the meanest mama in the world. But you think, darling, I got one minute's happiness like this?"
"I been laying here half the night, Ruby, thinking how I'm a bad mother what thinks only of her own--"
"No, no, mommy. Turn over and go to sl--"
"My daughter falls in love with a fine, upright young man like Leo Markovitch, and I ain't satisfied yet! Suppose maybe for two or three years you ain't so much on your feet. Suppose even his uncle Meyer don't take him in. Don't any young man got to get his start slow?"
"Because I got for her my own ideas, my daughter shouldn't have in life the man she wants!"