"Sat there and looked at poor old man Katz with his ear all ragged like it had been chewed off, and wondered why he didn't just go down to Brooklyn Bridge for a high jump."
"If all those big, strapping women, Suss and Finshriber and the whole gang of them, were anything but vegetables, they'd get out and hustle with keeping house, to work some of their flabbiness off and give us a chance to get somebody in besides a chocolate-eating, novel-reading crowd of useless women who think, mommy, you're a dumbwaiter, chambermaid, lady's maid, and French chef rolled in one! Honest, ma, if you carry that ice-water up to Katz to-night on the sly, with that big son of hers to come down and get it, I--I'll go right up and tell her what I think of her if she leaves to-morrow."
"Mr. Vetsburg, you--you mustn't listen to her."
"Can't take a day off for a rest at Atlantic City, because their old Easter dinner might go down the wrong side. Honest, mama, to--to think how you're letting a crowd of old, flabby women that aren't fit even to wipe your shoes make a regular servant out of you! Mommy!"
There were tears in Miss Kaufman's voice, actual tears, big and bright, in her eyes, and two spots of color had popped out in her cheeks.
"Ruby, when--when a woman like me makes her living off her boarders, she can't afford to be so particular. You think it's a pleasure I can't slam the door right in Mrs. Katz's face when six times a day she orders towels and ice-water? You think it's a pleasure I got to take sass from such a bad boy like Irving? I tell you, Ruby, it's easy talk from a girl that doesn't understand. _Ach_, you--you make me ashamed before Mr. Vetsburg you should run down to the people we make our living off of."
Miss Kaufman flashed her vivid face toward Mr. Vetsburg, still low there in his chair. She was trembling. "Vetsy knows! He's the only one in this house does know! He 'ain't been here with us ten years, ever since we started in this big house, not--not to know he's the only one thinks you're here for anything except impudence and running stairs and standing sass from the bad boys of lazy mothers. You know, don't you, Vetsy?"
"Ruby! Mr. Vetsburg, you--you must excuse--"
From the depths of his chair Mr. Vetsburg's voice came slow and carefully weighed. "My only complaint, Mrs. Kaufman, with what Ruby has got to say is it ain't strong enough. It maybe ain't none of my business, but always I have told you that for your own good you're too _gemütlich_. No wonder every boarder what you got stays year in and year out till even the biggest kickers pay more board sooner as go. In my business, Mrs. Kaufman, it's the same, right away if I get too easy with--"