"For why should an up-to-date American girl like Clara like such an old-fashioned place as I keep? Nowadays, girls got different ideas. They don't think nothing of seventy-five-dollar suits and twelve-dollar shoes. I can't help it that it goes against my grain no matter how fine a money-maker a girl is. In the old country my sister Carrie and me never even had shoes on our feet until we were twelve, much less—"
"But, ma—"
"Oh, I don't blame her, Sam. I don't blame her that she don't like it the way I dish up everything on the table so we can serve ourselves. She likes it passed the way they did that night at Mrs. Goldfinger's new daughter-in-law's, where everything is carried from one to the next one, and you got to help yourself quick over your shoulders."
"Clara's like me, ma; she wants you to keep a servant to do the waiting on you."
"It ain't in me, Sam, to be bossed to by a servant, just like I can't take down off the walls pictures of your papa selig and your grandma, because it ain't stylish they should be there. It's a feeling in me for my own flesh and blood that nothing can change."
"Clara don't want you to change that, ma."
"She's a fine, up-to-date girl, Sam. A girl that can work herself up to head floor-lady in wholesale ribbons and forty dollars a week has got in her the kind of smartness my boy should have in his wife. I'm an old woman standing in the way of my boy. If I wasn't, I could go out to Marietta, Ohio, by Ruby, and I wouldn't keep having inside of me such terrible fears for my boy and—and how things are now on the other side and—and—"
"Now, now, ma; no April showers!"
"An old woman that can't even be happy with a good daughter like Ruby, but hangs always on her son like a stone around his neck!"
"You mean like a diamond."