She paused, her cup of coffee half-way to her lips, the lines of her face seeming to want to lift into what would be a smile. "No, Sammy; your mother knows she ain't, and if she was anything but a selfish old woman, she would be glad that she ain't."
"'Sh! 'Sh!" said Mr. Lipkind, reaching this time half across the table for a still steaming muffin and opening it so that its hot fragrance came out. '"Sh! No April showers! Uh! Uh! Don't you dare!"
"I ain't," said Mrs. Lipkind, smiling through her tear and dashing at it with the back of her hand. "For why should I when I got only everything to be thankful for?"
"Now you're shouting!"
"How you think, Sammy, Clara likes a cheese pie for supper to-night? Last week I could see she didn't care much for the noodle pudding I baked her."
Mr. Lipkind, who was ever so slightly and prematurely bald and still more slightly and prematurely rotund, suffered a rush of color then, his ears suddenly and redly conspicuous.
"That's—that's what I started to tell you last night, ma. Clara telephoned over to the store in the afternoon she—she thought she wouldn't come to supper this Wednesday night, ma."
"Sammy—you—you and Clara 'ain't got nothing wrong together, the way you don't see each other so much these two months?"
"Of course not, ma; it's just happened a few times that way. The trade's in town; that's all."
"How is it all of a sudden a girl in the wholesale ribbon business should have the trade to entertain like she was in the cloak-and-suit chorus?"