"How do you do when you are getting all of a sudden company?" Yetta asked. "I didn't see no delicatessen store round here."
"You didn't?" Mrs. Ortelsburg exclaimed. "Why, right behind the depot is Mrs. J. Kaplan's a delicatessen store, which I am only saying to her yesterday, 'Mrs. Kaplan,' I says, 'how do you got all the time such fresh, nice smoke-tongue here?' And she says, 'It's the country air,' she says, 'which any one could see; not alone smoke-tongue keeps fresh, aber my daughter also, when she comes down here,' she says, 'she is pale like anything—and look at her now!' And it's a fact, Mrs. Lubliner, the daughter did look sick, and to-day yet she's got a complexion fresh like a tomato already. That's what Burgess Park done for her!"
"But don't you got difficulty keeping a girl, Mrs. Ortelsburg?" Yetta inquired.
"Difficulty?" Mrs. Ortelsburg cried. "Why, just let me show you my kitchen. The girls love it here. In the first place, we are only twenty minutes from Coney Island; and, in the second place, with all the eggs which we got it, they could always entertain their fellers here in such a fine, big kitchen, which I am telling my girl, Lena: 'So long as you give 'em omelets or fried eggs mit fat, Lena, I don't care how many eggs you use—aber butter is butter in Burgess Park oder Harlem.'"
In this vein Mrs. Ortelsburg continued for more than an hour, while she conducted Yetta to the kitchen and cellar and back again to the bedrooms above stairs, until she decided that sufficient interest had been aroused to justify the more robust method of her husband. She therefore returned to the library, and therewith began for Benno Ortelsburg the real business of the afternoon.
"Well, boys," he said, "I guess we would quit pinocle for a while and join the ladies."
He chose for this announcement a moment when Elkan's chips showed a profit of five dollars; and as, in his capacity of banker, he adjusted the losses of the other players, he kept up a merry conversation directed at Mrs. Lubliner.
"Here in Burgess Park," he said, "we play pinocle and we leave it alone; while in the city when a couple business men play pinocle they spend a day at it—and why? Because they only get a chance to play pinocle once in a while occasionally. Every night they are going to theatre oder a lodge affair, understand me; whereas here, the train service at night not being so extra elegant, y'understand, we got good houses and we stay in 'em; which in Burgess Park after half-past seven in the evening any one could find a dozen pinocle games to play in—and all of 'em breaks up by half-past ten already."
With this tribute to the transit facilities and domesticity of Burgess Park, he concluded stacking up the chips and turned to Mrs. Lubliner.
"Yes, Mrs. Lubliner," he continued with an amiable smile, "if you wouldn't persuade your husband to move out to Burgess Park, understand me, I shall consider it you don't like our house here at all."