"Used to it from home—not? She is not. Believe me, I knew Max Gronauer when he first started in the produce business in Jersey City and the only perfume he had was at seventeen cents a pound and not always fresh killed at that. Cold storage de printemps!"
"Max Gronauer died just two months after my husband," said Mrs. Samstag, tucking away into her beaded handbag her filet-lace handkerchief, itself guilty of a not inexpensive attar.
"Thu-thu!" clucked Mr. Latz for want of a fitting retort.
"Heigh-ho! I always say we have so little in common, me and Mrs. Gronauer, she revokes so in bridge, and I think it's terrible for a grandmother to blondine so red, but we've both been widows for almost eight years. Eight years," repeated Mrs. Samstag on a small, scented sigh.
He was inordinately sensitive to these allusions, reddening and wanting to seem appropriate.
"Poor little woman, you've had your share of trouble."
"Share," she repeated, swallowing a gulp and pressing the line of her eyebrows as if her thoughts were sobbing. "I—It's as I tell Alma, Mr. Latz, sometimes I think I've had three times my share. My one consolation is that I try to make the best of it. That's my motto in life, 'Keep a bold front.'"
For the life of him, all he could find to convey to her the bleeding quality of his sympathy was, "Poor, poor little woman!"
"Heigh-ho!" she said, and again, "Heigh-ho!"
There was quite a nape to her neck. He could see it where the carefully trimmed brown hair left it for a rise to skillful coiffure, and what threatened to be a slight depth of flesh across the shoulders had been carefully massaged of this tendency, fifteen minutes each night and morning, by her daughter.