He led her to a high-backed lounge against the wall, where, seated on its extreme edge, he gazed silently at her with an expression of sentimental concern. Mr. Moses Feldt was a short round man, bald but for a fluffy rim of pale hair, and with the palest imaginable eyes in a countenance perpetually flushed by the physical necessity of accommodating his rotundity to awkward edges and conditions. As usual he was dressed with the nicest care—a band of white linen laid in the opening of his waistcoat, his scarf ornamented by a pear-shaped pearl on a diamond finished stem; his cloth-topped varnished black shoes glistened, while his short fat fingers clasped a prodigious unlighted cigar. At last, in a tone exactly suited to his gaze, he exclaimed:
“So that naughty mama has gone out again and deserted Moses and her little Linda!” In what way her mother had deserted Mr. Feldt she failed to understand. Of course he wanted to marry them—the comprehensive phrase was his own—but that didn't include him in whatever they did. Principally it made a joke for their private entertainment. Mrs. Condon would mimic his eager manner, “Stella, let me take you both home where you'll have the best in the land,” And, “Ladies like you ought to have a loving protection.” Linda would laugh in her cool bell-like manner, and her mother add a satirical comment on the chance any Moses Feldt had of marrying her.
Linda at once found him ridiculous and a being who forced a slighting warmth of liking. His appearance was preposterous, the ready emotion often too foolish for words; but underneath there was a—a goodness, a mysterious quality that stirred her heart to recognition. Certain rare things in life and experience affected her like that memory of an old happiness. She could never say what they might be, they came at the oddest times and by the most extraordinary means; but at their occurrence she would thrill for a moment as if in response to a sound of music.
It was, for example, absurd that Mr. Moses Feldt, who was a Jew, should make her feel like that, but he did. And all the while that she was disagreeable to him, or mocking him behind his back, she was as uncomfortable and “horrid” as possible. While this fact, of course, only served to make her horrider still. At present she adopted the manner of a patience that nothing could quite exhaust; she was polite and formal, relentlessly correct in position.
Mr. Moses Feldt, the cigar in his grasp, pressed a hand to the probable region of his heart. “You don't know how I think of you,” he protested, tears in his eyes; “just the idea of you exposed to anything at all in hotels keeps me awake nights. Now it's a drunk, or a fresh feller on the elevator, or—”
“It's nice of you,” Linda said, “but you needn't worry. No one would dare to bother us. No one ever has.”
“You wouldn't know it if they did,” he replied despondently, “at your age. And then your mother is so trustful and pleasant. Take those parties where she is so much—roof frolics and cocoanut groves and submarine cafés; they don't come to any good. Rowdy.” Linda studied him coldly; if he criticized them further she would leave. He mopped a shining brow with a large colorful silk handkerchief. “It throws me into a sweat,” he admitted.
“Really, Mr. Feldt, you mustn't bother,” she told him in one of her few impulses of friendliness. “You see, we are very experienced.” He nodded without visible happiness at this truth. “I'm a jackass!” he cried. “Judith tells me that all the time. If you could only see my daughters,” he continued with a new vigor; “such lovely girls as they are. One dark like you and the other fair as a daisy. Judith and Pansy. And my home that darling mama made before she died.” The handkerchief was again in evidence.
“Women and girls are funny. I can't get you there and not for nothing will Judith make a step. It may be pride but it seems to me such nonsense. I guess I'm old-fashioned and love's old-fashioned. Homes have gone out of style with the rest. It's all these restaurants and roofs now, yes, and studios. I tell the girls to stay away from them and from artists and so on. I don't encourage them at the apartment—a big lump of a feller with platinum bracelets on his wrists. What kind of a man would that be! I'd like to know who'd buy goods from him.
“Sometimes, I'm sorry I got a lot of money, but it made mama happy. When she laid there at the last sick and couldn't live, I said, 'Oh, if you only won't leave me I'll give you gold to eat.'” He was so moved, his face so red, that Linda grew acutely embarrassed. People were looking at them. She rose stiffly but, in spite of her effort to escape him, he caught both her hands in his: