"Listen to her, ma, and then you blame me for not bringing any of the fellows round here for her to meet. You don't catch me doing it, the way she thinks she's better than they are and gives them the high hand. Not muchy!"
"I should worry for the kind you bring, Izzy."
"As nice boys Izzy has brought home, Miriam, as ever in my life I would want to meet."
"Yes, but you see for yourself the way the society fellows, like Sol Blumenthal and Laz Herzog, hang round the Lillianthal girls. I always got to take a back seat, and maybe you think I don't know it."
"I never heard that on ships young men was so plentiful."
"She wants to land an Italian count and she'll just about land a barber."
Mr. Binswanger peered suddenly over the rim of his paper. "A no-count yet is what we need in the family. Get right away such ideas out your head. All my life I 'ain't worked so hard to spend my money on the old country. In America I made it and in America I spend it. Now just stop it, right away, too."
"Go to it, pa!"
Suddenly Miss Binswanger let fall her head into her cupped hands. Tears trickled through. "I—I just wish that I—I hadn't been born! Why—did you move up-town, then, where everybody does things, if—if—"
Her father's reply came in a sudden avalanche. "For why? Because then, just like now, you nagged me. You can take it from me, just so happy as now was me and mamma down by Rivington Street. I'm a plain man and with no time for nonsense. I tell you the shirtwaist business 'ain't been so good that—"