"Well, Mawruss," said Abe, his face wreathed in a malicious grin, "you made a quick job of it."
Morris scowled.
"I ain't spoken to her yet," he grunted. "I got a little gumption, Abe—a little consideration and common sense. I don't throw out my dirty water until I get clean."
Abe puffed slowly before replying.
"I seen some people, Mawruss," he said, "what sometimes throws out perfectly clean water, and gets some dirty water in exchange, Mawruss." He threw away the stump of his cigar.
"Sometimes, Mawruss," he concluded solemnly, "they gets a good, big souse, Mawruss, where they least expect it."
Ike Feinsilver, city salesman for the Hamsuckett Mills—Goldner & Plotkin, proprietors—was obviously his own ideal of a well-dressed man. His shirts and waistcoats represented a taste as original as it was not subdued; but it was in the selection of his neckties that he really excelled. Abe and Morris fairly blinked as they surveyed his latest acquisition in cravats when he entered the door of their store that afternoon, smiling a pleasant greeting at his prospective customers.
He presented so brilliant a picture that Miss Cohen was drawn from her desk in the glass-enclosed office toward the trio in the sample room as inevitably as the moth to the candle flame. She took up some cutting slips from a table, by way of excuse for her intrusion, but the blush and smile with which she acknowledged Ike's rather perfunctory nod betrayed her. Abe was fingering the Hamsuckett swatches, but Miss Cohen's embarrassment did not escape Morris Perlmutter. He marked it with an inward start, and immediately conceived a brilliant idea.
"Ike," he said, when Abe had completed the giving of a small order and had left them alone together, "a young feller like you ought to get married."