"In that case I should recommend you don't buy a Kermanshah rug for the front room," Sigmund Tarnowitz interrupted. "I got in my place right now an antique Beloochistan, which I would let go at only four hundred dollars."
"Aber four hundred dollars is an awful lot of money to pay for a rug," Elkan protested. He had avoided looking at Yetta for the past half-hour; but now he glanced fearfully at her, and in doing so received a distinct shock, for Yetta sat with shining eyes and flushed cheeks, inoculated beyond remedy with the virus of the artistic-home fever.
"Four hundred ain't so much for a rug," she declared.
"Not for an antique Beloochistan," Sig Tarnowitz said, "because every year it would increase in value on you."
"Just the same like that Linden Boulevard house," Ortelsburg added, "which you could take it from me, Mrs. Lubliner, if you don't get right away an offer of five hundred dollars advance on your purchase price I would eat the house, plumbing and all."
At the word "plumbing" Glaubmann started visibly.
"The plumbing would be fixed so good as new," he said; "and I tell you what I would do also, Mr. Lubliner—I would pay fifty per cent. of the decorations if Mr. Ortelsburg would make me an allowance of a hundred dollars on the commission!"
"Could anything be fairer than this?" Ortelsburg exclaimed; and he grinned maliciously as Louis Stout succumbed to a fit of coughing.
"But we ain't even seen the house!" Elkan cried.
"Never mind we ain't seen it," Yetta said; "if the house is the same like this that's all I care about."