"I—It ain't like I can talk over Nicky with you, Mosher, like another woman could with her husband. Either you give him right or right away you get so mad you make it worse with him than better."
"Now, Sara—"
"But only this morning that Mrs. Lessauer I meet sometimes at Epstein's fish store—you know the rich sausage-casings Lessauers—she says to me this morning, she says with her sweetness full of such a meanness, like it was knives in me—'Me and my son and daughter-in-law was coming out of a movie last night and we saw your son getting into a taxicab with such a blonde in a red hat!' The way she said it, Mosher, like a cat licking its whiskers—'such a blonde in a red hat'!"
"I wish I had one dollar in my pocket for every blond hat with red hair her Felix had before he married."
"But it's the second time this week I hear it, Mosher. The same description of such a—a nix in a red hat. Once in a cabaret show Gussie says she heard it from a neighbor, and now in and out from taxicabs with her. Four times this week he's not been home, Mosher. I can't help it, I—I get crazy with worry."
A sudden, almost a simian old-age seemed to roll, like a cloud that can thunder, across Sara's face. She was suddenly very small and no little old. Veins came out on her brow and upon the backs of her hands, and Mosher, depressed with an unconscious awareness, was looking into the tired, cold, watery eyes of the fleet woman who had been his.
"Why, Sara!" he said, and came around the table to let her head wilt in unwonted fashion against his coat. "Mamma!"
"I'm tired, Mosher." She said her words almost like a gush of warm blood from the wound of her mouth. "I'm tired from keeping up and holding in. I have felt so sure for these last four years that we have saved him from his—his wildness—and now, to begin all over again, I—I 'ain't got the fight left in me, Mosher."
"You don't have to have any fight in you, Mamma. 'Ain't you got a husband and a son to fight for you?"
"Sometimes I think, except for the piece of my heart I left lying back there, that there are worse agonies than even massacres. I've struggled so that he should be good and great, Mosher, and now, after four years already thinking I've won—maybe, after all, I haven't."