"Burgess Park ain't such high ground neither," Elkan Lubliner retorted. "Max Kovner says he lives out there on Linden Boulevard three months only and he gets full up with malaria something terrible."
"Malaria we ain't got it in Burgess Park!" Louis declared. "I am living there now six years, Elkan, and I never bought so much as a two-grain quinine pill. Furthermore, Elkan, Kovner's malaria you could catch in Denver, Colorado, or on an ocean steamer, y'understand; because, with a lowlife bum like Max Kovner, which he sits up till all hours of the night—a drinker and a gambler, understand me—you don't got to be a professor exactly to diagonize his trouble. It ain't malaria, Elkan, it's Katzenjammer!"
"But my Yetta is stuck on Johnsonhurst," Elkan protested, "and she already makes up her mind we would move out there."
"That was just the way with my wife," Louis said. "For six months she is crying all the time Ogden Estates; and if I would listen to her, Elkan, and bought out there, y'understand, instead we would be turning down offers on our house at an advance of twenty per cent. on the price we paid for it, we would be considering letting the property go under foreclosure! You ought to see that place Ogden Estates nowadays, Elkan—nothing but a bunch of Italieners lives there."
"But——" Elkan began.
"Another thing," Louis Stout broke in: "Out in Johnsonhurst what kind of society do you got? Moe Rabiner lives there, and Marks Pasinsky lives there—and Gott weiss wer noch. My partner, Mr. Flugel, is approached the other day with an offer of some property in Johnsonhurst, and I was really in favour he should take it up; but he says to me, 'Louis,' he says, 'a place where such people lives like Pasinsky and Rabiner I wouldn't touch at all!' And he was right, Elkan. Salesmen and designers only lives in Johnsonhurst; while out in Burgess Park we got a nice class of people living, Elkan. You know J. Kamin, of the Lee Printemps, Pittsburgh?"
"Used to was one of our best customers," Philip Scheikowitz replied, "though he passed us up last year."
"His sister, Mrs. Benno Ortelsburg, lives one house by the other with me," Louis went on. "Her husband does a big real-estate business there. Might you also know Julius Tarnowitz, of the Tarnowitz-Wixman Department Store, Rochester?"
"Bought from us a couple years a small bill," Marcus Polatkin said. "I wish we could sell him more."
"Well, his brother, Sig Tarnowitz, lives across the street from us," Louis cried triumphantly. "Sig's got a fine business there on Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn."