She pushed a wall key, a center chandelier of frosted electric bulbs springing into radiance. In its immediate glare Mrs. Loeb regarded her daughter-in-law, inert there beside the window.
"Get your embroidery, Sadie, and come down by me and Etta till the men get home to supper. I want her to show you that cut-work stitch she's putting in her lunch napkins."
"Ugh!"
"What?"
Mrs. Bertha Loeb approached with the forward peer of the nearsighted. Time and maternity had had their whacks at her figure, her stoutness enhanced by a bothersome shelf of bust, but her face—the same virile profile of her son's and with the graying hair parted tightly from it—guiltless of lines, except now, regarding her daughter-in-law, a horizontal crease came into her brow.
"You want to go sit a while by grandma, then?"
"No. Gee! can't—can't a girl just sit up in her room quiet? I'm all right."
"I didn't say, Sadie, you wasn't all right. Only a young girl with everything to be thankful for don't need to sit up in her room like it was a funeral, with her mother and sister and grandma in the same house."
On the mahogany arms of her chair Mrs. Herman Loeb's small hand closed in a tight fist over her damp wad of handkerchief,