"But—"
"Promise me, Sammy; I can't stand it if you don't."
"Alright, I'll go, ma."
The Declaration of Economic Independence is not always a subtle one. There was that about Clara Bloom, even to the rather Hellenic swing of her very tailor-made back and the firm, neat clack of her not too high heels, which proclaimed that a new century had filed her fetter-free from the nine-teen-centuries-long chain of women whose pin-money had too often been blood-money or the filched shekels from trousers pocket or what in the toga corresponded thereto.
And yet, when Miss Bloom smiled, which upon occasion she did spontaneously enough to show a gold molar, there were not only Hypatia and Portia in the straight line of her lips, but lurked in the little tip-tilt at the corners a quirk from Psyche, who loved and was so loved, and in the dimple in her chin a manhole, as it were, for Mr. Samuel Lipkind.
At six o'clock, where the wintry workaday flows into dusk and Fifth Avenue flows across Broadway, they met, these two, finding each other out in the gaseous shelter of a Subway kiosk. She from the tall, thin, skylightless skyscraper dedicated to the wholesale supply of woman's insatiable demand for the ribbon gewgaw; he from a plate-glass shop with his name inscribed across its front and more humbly given over to the more satiable demand of the male for the two-dollar hat. There was a gold-and-black sign which ran across the not inconsiderable width of Mr. Lipkind's store-front and which invariably captioned his four inches of Sunday-news-paper advertisement:
SAMMY LIPKIND WANTS YOUR HEAD
As near as it is possible for the eye to simulate the heart, there was exactly that sentiment in his glance now as he found out Miss Bloom, she in a purple-felt hat and the black scallops of escaping hair, blacker because the red was out in her cheeks.
He broke into the kind of smile that lifted his every feature, screw-lines at his eyes coming out, head bared, and his greeting beginning to come even before she was within hearing distance of it.
There was in Mr. Lipkind precious little of Lothario, Launcelot, Galahad, or any of that blankety-blank-verse coterie. There remains yet unsung the lay of the five-foot-five, slightly bald, and ever so slightly rotund lover. Falstaff and Romeo are the extremes of what Mr. Lipkind was the not unhappy medium. Offhand in public places, men would swap crop conditions and city politics with him. Twice, tired mothers in railway stations had volunteered him their babies to dandle. Young women, however, were not all impervious to him, and uncrossed their feet and became consciously unconscious of him across street-car aisles. In his very Two Dollar Hat Store, Sara Minniesinger, hooked of profile, but who had impeccably kept his debits and credits for twelve years back under the stock-balcony and a green eye-shade, was wont to cry of evenings over and for him into her dingy pillow. He was so unconscious of this that, on the twelfth anniversary of her incarceration beneath the stock-balcony, he commissioned his mother to shop her a crown of thorns in the form of a gold-handled umbrella with a bachelor-girl flash-light attachment.