"All right, then! You know it so well I can't tell you nothing—all I got is a little tiredness from the heat."
"Go in and lay down. Can't you tell mamma what hurts you, Abie? Are you afraid it would give me a little pleasure if you tell me? No consideration that boy has got for his mother!"
"Honest, mamma, ain't I told you three times I ain't nothing but tired?"
"He snaps me up yet like he was a turtle and me his worst enemy! For what should I worry myself? For my part, I don't care. I only say, Abie, if there's anything hurts you—you know how poor papa started to complain just one night like this how he fussed at me when I wanted the doctor. If there's anything hurts you—"
"There ain't, mamma."
"Come in and let me fix the sofa for you. I only say when you close the store early there's something wrong. That Miss Ruby should go off yet—vacation she has to have—a girl like that, with her satin shoes and all—comes into the store at nine o'clock 'cause she runs to the picture shows all night! Yetta Washeim seen her. Vacation yet she has to have! Twenty years I spent with poor papa in the store, and no vacation did I have. Lay down, Abie."
"All right, then," said Mr. Ginsburg, as if duty were a geological eon, and throwing himself across the flowered velvet lounge in the parlor. "I'll lay down if it suits you better."
Mr. Ginsburg was of a cut that never appears on a classy clothes advertisement or in the silver frame on the bird's-eye maple dressing-table of sweet sixteen or more; he belonged to the less ornamented but not unimportant stratum that manufactures the classy clothes by the hundred thousand, and eventually develops into husbands and sponsors for full-length double-breasted sealskin coats for the sweet sixteens and more.
He was as tall as Napoleon, with a round, un-Napoleonic head, close-shaved so that his short-nap hair grew tight like moss on a rock, and a beard that defied every hirsute precaution by pricking darkly through the lower half of his face as phenomenally as the first grass-blades of spring push out in an hour.
"Let me fix you a little something, Abie. I got grand broth in the ice-box—all I need to do is to heat it."