"I read about you in the newspapers," Yetta said, as they seated themselves in adjoining rockers, and Mrs. Gans flashed all the gems of her right hand in a gesture of deprecation.
"I tell you," she said, "it makes me sick here the way people carries on. Honestly, Yetta, I don't see Barney only at meals and when he's getting dressed. Everything is Mister Scharley, Mister Scharley. You would think he was H. P. Morgan oder the Czar of Russland from the fuss everybody makes over him."
Yetta nodded in sympathy and suddenly Mrs. Gans clutched the arm of her chair.
"There he is now," she hissed.
"Where?" Yetta asked, and Mrs. Gans nodded toward a doorway at the end of the veranda, on which in electric bulbs was outlined the legend, "Hanging Gardens." Yetta descried a short, stout personage between fifty and sixty years of age, arrayed in a white flannel suit of which the coat and waistcoat were cut in imitation of an informal evening costume. On his arm there drooped a lady no longer in her twenties, and from the V-shaped opening in the rear of her dinner gown a medical student could have distinguished with more or less certainty the bones of the cervical vertebræ, the right and left scapula and the articulation of each with the humerus and clavicle.
"That's Miss Feldman," Mrs. Gans whispered. "She's refined like anything, Yetta, and she talks French better as a waiter already."
At this juncture the dinner gong sounded and Yetta rejoined Elkan in the social hall.
"What is the trouble you are looking so rachmonos, Elkan?" she asked as she pressed his arm consolingly.
"To-night it's Sol Klinger," Elkan replied. "He's got a dinner on in the Hanging Gardens for Scharley, Yetta, and I guess I wouldn't get a look-in even."
"You've got six weeks before you," Yetta assured him, "and you shouldn't worry. Something is bound to turn up, ain't it?"