Mr. Moses Feldt, the cigar in his grasp, pressed a hand to the probable region of his heart. “You don't know how I think of you,” he protested, tears in his eyes; “just the idea of you exposed to anything at all in hotels keeps me awake nights. Now it's a drunk, or a fresh feller on the elevator, or--”
“It's nice of you,” Linda said, “but you needn't worry. No one would dare to bother us. No one ever has.”
“You wouldn't know it if they did,” he replied despondently, “at your age. And then your mother is so trustful and pleasant. Take those parties where she is so much--roof frolics and cocoanut groves and submarine cafés; they don't come to any good. Rowdy.” Linda studied him coldly; if he criticized them further she would leave. He mopped a shining brow with a large colorful silk handkerchief. “It throws me into a sweat,” he admitted.
“Really, Mr. Feldt, you mustn't bother,” she told him in one of her few impulses of friendliness. “You see, we are very experienced.” He nodded without visible happiness at this truth. “I'm a jackass!” he cried. “Judith tells me that all the time. If you could only see my daughters,” he continued with a new vigor; “such lovely girls as they are. One dark like you and the other fair as a daisy. Judith and Pansy. And my home that darling mama made before she died.” The handkerchief was again in evidence.
“Women and girls are funny. I can't get you there and not for nothing will Judith make a step. It may be pride but it seems to me such nonsense. I guess I'm old-fashioned and love's old-fashioned. Homes have gone out of style with the rest. It's all these restaurants and roofs now, yes, and studios. I tell the girls to stay away from them and from artists and so on. I don't encourage them at the apartment--a big lump of a feller with platinum bracelets on his wrists. What kind of a man would that be! I'd like to know who'd buy goods from him.
“Sometimes, I'm sorry I got a lot of money, but it made mama happy. When she laid there at the last sick and couldn't live, I said, 'Oh, if you only won't leave me I'll give you gold to eat.'” He was so moved, his face so red, that Linda grew acutely embarrassed. People were looking at them. She rose stiffly but, in spite of her effort to escape him, he caught both her hands in his: