"If I get mad you're mad, and if I don't get mad you're mad! Go do me something to help me solve such a riddle like you."
"It's because me and his aunt Gussie are a pair of matchmaking old women. That the two cousins should marry the two sisters, Irma and Ada, we got it fixed between us! Just as if because we want it that way it's got to happen that way!"
"A pair of geeses, the two of you!"
"I wouldn't let on to Gussie, but Ada, the single one, has got Leo's
Irma beat for looks. Such a complexion! And the way she comes over to
sew with me afternoons! A young girl like that! An old woman like me!
You see, Mosher? See?"
"See, she asks me. What good does it do me if I see or I don't see when his mother gets her mind made up?"
"But does Nicky so much as look at her? That night at Leo's birthday I was ashamed the way he right away had an engagement after supper, when she sat next to him and all through the meal gave him the white meat off her own plate. Why, the flowered chiffon dress that girl had on cost ten dollars a yard if it cost a cent. Did Nicky so much as look at her? No."
"Too many birthdays in this family."
"I notice you eat them when they are set down in front of you!"
"Eat what?"
"The birthdays."