"Uncle—Uncle Mark, I guess, will furnish us up like he did Leon and Irma—only, I don't want mahogany; I want Circassian walnut. He gave them their flat-silver, too, Puritan design, for an engagement present. Think of it, mama, me having that stuck-up Irma Sinsheimer for a relation! It always made her sore when I got chums with Amy at school and got my nose in it with the Acme crowd, and—and she'll change her tune now, I guess, me marrying her husband's second cousin."
"Didn't Lester want to—to come in for a while, Selene, to—to see—me?"
Sitting there on her heels, Miss Coblenz looked away, answering with her face in profile.
"Yes; only—I—well, if you want to know it, mama, it's no fun for a girl to bring a boy like Lester up here in—in this crazy room, all hung up with gramaw's wreaths and half the time her sitting out there in the dark, looking in at us through the door and talking to herself."
"Gramaw's an old—"
"Is it any wonder I'm down at Amy's half the time? How do you think a girl feels to have gramaw keep hanging onto that old black wig of hers and not letting me take the crayons or wreaths down off the wall? In Lester's crowd they don't know nothing about revolutionary stuff and persecutions. Amy's grandmother don't even talk with an accent, and Lester says his grandmother came from Alsace-Lorraine. That's French. They think only tailors and old-clothes men and—."
"Selene!"
"Well, they do. You—you're all right, mama, as up to date as any of them, but how do you think a girl feels, with gramaw always harping right in front of everybody the way granpa was a revolutionist and was hustled off barefooted to Siberia like a tramp? And the way she was cooking black beans when my uncle died. Other girls' grandmothers don't tell everything they know. Alma Yawitz's grandmother wears lorgnettes, and you told me yourself they came from nearly the same part of the Pale as gramaw. But you don't hear them remembering it. Alma Yawitz says she's Alsace-Lorraine on both sides. People don't tell everything they know. Anyway where a girl's got herself as far as I have!"
Through sobs that rocked her, Mrs. Coblenz looked down upon her daughter.
"Your poor old grandmother don't deserve that from you! In her day she worked her hands to the bone for you. With the kind of father you had we might have died in the gutter but for how she helped to keep us out, you ungrateful girl—your poor old grandmother, that's suffered so terrible!"