"For all the help you are to me you might as well stay in bed the rest of the morning. A girl that can come home from a party and have nothing to say! But for my part I don't want to know. I guess they had a big blow-out, didn't they?"
Birdie, high-chested as Juno, with wide, firm shoulders that sloped as must have sloped the shoulders of Artemis when they tempted Actæon, coiled her hair before the mirror with the gesture that has belonged to women since first they coiled their hair. Her cheeks, fleshly but fruit-like in their freshness, might have belonged to a buxom nymph of the grove.
"I wish you could have seen the spread Jeanette had, mamma! I brought home the recipe for her lobster chops. I'll bet if she had one she had six different kinds of ice-cream."
With one swoop Mrs. Katzenstein flung the snowy avalanche of pillows and sheets over the footboard of the bed and opened wide both the windows.
"Tillie," she cried, "bring me the broom. I'll start in Miss Birdie's room while you finish the breakfast dishes."
"Such an affair as she had! I said to Marcus, on the way home, it could have been at Delmonico's and not have been finer."
"You don't say so! Such is life, ain't it? We knew Simon Lefkowitz when he used to come to papa and buy for his stock six shirt-waists at a time. Then they didn't live in no eighty-dollar apartment. Many's the morning I used to meet the old lady at market. Who else was there?"
"Who? Let me see! Gertie Glauber was there. She had on that dress Laevitt made; and, believe me, I liked mine better. Tekla Stein and Morris Adler—you know those Adlers in the millinery business?"
"Nice people!"
"You couldn't get a pin between Tekla and him—honest, how that girl worked for him! Selma Blumenthal was there, too, and I must say she looked grand—those eyes of hers and that figure! But what those fellows can see in her so much I don't know. Honest, mamma, she's such a dumbhead she can't talk ten words to a boy."