"Isn't that just the sweetest picture, moms?"
"It certainly is! Mr. Pelz took me down to the projection-room to see its first showing, and I give you my word I said to him and Sol—didn't I, Roody?—'That picture is a fortune.' And never in my life did I fail to pick a winner—did I, Roody? I got a knack for it. Mr. Feist, have you seen 'The Lure of Silk'?"
"Sorry to say I have not."
"If you think that is a riot, Mrs. Pelz, you wait until you see the way they're going to eat me up in the court scene in 'Saint Elba.' I had the whole studio crying down there to-day—didn't I, Mr. Pelz? Crying like babies over the scene where I stand like this—so—overlooking—"
"Say, Rosie, that's twice already Williams announced dinner is served."
"Overlooking the—"
"I hear Friedman & Kaplan made an assignment, Feist."
"Come, Lester; you take me in to dinner. Rudolph, you go and get mamma.
Bleema, you and Mr. Feist be escorts."
In a dining-room so unswervingly Jacobean that its high-back chairs formed an actual enclosure about the glittering, not to say noble, oval of table, the dinner-hour moved through the stately procession of its courses. At its head, Mrs. Miriam Sopinsky, dim with years and the kind of weariness of the flesh that Rembrandt knew so well, her face even yellower beneath the black wig with the bold row of machine-stitching down its center, the hands veiny and often uncertain among the dishes.
"Roody, cut up mamma's chicken for her. She trembles so."