"What!" Morris cried. "Did Mosha Kronberg telephone that himself?"
"All right, Mawruss; then I am a liar!" Abe exploded. "I am telling you with my own ears I heard him."
"I believe you, Abe," Morris said soothingly. "Don't hurry back from your lunch. I got lots of time."
"I would hurry back oder not, as I please, Mawruss," Abe retorted as he trudged off toward Hammersmith's restaurant. There he ministered to his outraged feelings with a steaming dish of gefüllte rinderbrust, and it was not till he had sopped up the last drop of gravy with a piece of rye bread that he became conscious of a stranger sitting opposite to him.
"Excuse me," said the latter, "you got a little soup on the lapel of your coat."
"That ain't soup," Abe explained, as he dipped his napkin in his glass of ice-water and started to remove the stain; "that's a little gefüllte rinderbrust, which they fix it so thin and watery nowadays it might just as well be soup the way it's always getting over your clothes."
"Things ain't the same like they used to be," the stranger remarked. "Twenty—twenty-five years ago a feller could get a meal down on Canal Street for a quarter—understand me—which it was really something you could say was remarkable. Take any of them places, Gifkin's oder Wasserbauer's. Ain't I right?"
"Did you used to went to Gifkin's?" Abe asked.
"I should say!" his vis-à-vis replied. "When I was a boy of fifteen I am eating always regularly by Gifkin's."
"Me too. I used to eat a whole lot by Gifkin's," Abe said; "in fact, I think I must of seen you there."