"It would be too funny to live with him again." And Kitty's eyes danced.
"Do you think so?" said Mrs. Brill anxiously. And under the sunshine of her daughter's approval she confided to her that he had really turned up twice at Lazarus's, beautifully costumed, with diamonds on his fingers and a white flower in his button-hole, but that she had repulsed him as she would repulse a drunken heathen. He had put his arms round her, but she had shaken him off as one shakes off a black beetle.
Kitty turned away and stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth. She knew there was a tragic side, but the comic aspect affected her more.
"Then you think I was right?" Mrs. Brill wound up.
"Of course," Kitty said soothingly. "What do you want of him?"
"But don't tell Salvina, or she'd eat my head off." And then, the eager upleaping fountain of her mother's egoistic babblings beginning at last to trickle thinly, Kitty found a breathing-space in which to inform her of the great news that throbbed in her own breast.
"Lily Samuelson's dead! Mrs. Rosenstein, you know!"
"Oh, my God!" ejaculated Mrs. Brill, trembling like a leaf. Nothing upset her more than to find that persons within her ken could actually die.
"Yes, we had a cable from the Cape yesterday."
"Hear, O Israel! Let me see—yes, she must have died in child-birth."