"You should worry, Mr. Ginsburg! With such a business next year at this time you'll have two clerks and more breathing space than you got breath."
Mr. Ginsburg seated himself carefully beside her at a wide range, so that a customer for a seven-E last could have fitted in between them.
"I've built up a good business here, Miss Ruby. The trouble with poor papa was he was afraid to spend, and he was afraid of novelties. I couldn't learn him that a windowful of satin pumps helps swell the storm-rubber sale. Those little dollar-ninety-eights look swell on your feet, Miss Ruby; you're a good advertisement for the stock—not?"
"Funny what a hit them pumps make! Mr. Leavitt was crazy about them, too; but, say, what your mother thinks of these satin slippers I'd hate to tell you. When she was down the day before I left she looked at 'em till I got so nervous I tripped over the cracks between the boards. Say, but wasn't she sore about the new glass fixtures! I kinda felt like it was my fault, too; but I was strong for 'em because—"
"Mamma's the old-fashioned kind, Miss Ruby—her and poor papa like the old way of doing things. She's getting old, Miss Ruby, but she means well. She's a good mother—a good mother."
"She's sure a grand woman—carrying soup across to old Levinsky every day, and all."
"She's more'n you know she is, too, Miss Ruby—little things that woman does I could tell you about—when she didn't have it so good as now neither."
Miss Ruby dropped her lids until her eyes were as soft as plush behind the portières of her lashes; her voice dropped into a throat that might have been lined with that same soft plush.
"I had a mother for two days—like I said to Mr. Leavitt the other day up in the country—we was talking about different things. I says to him, I says, she quit when she looked at me—just laid down and died when I was two days old. I must have been enough to scare the daylights out of any one. Next to a pink worm on a fish-hook gimme a red-headed baby for the horrors! Say, you ought to seen Mr. Leavitt fish! Six bass he caught in one day—I sat next him and watched; we had 'em fried for supper. He's some little—"
"What a pleasure you'd 'a' been to your mother, Miss Ruby! Such a girl like you I could wish my own mother."