Scheikowitz nodded again.
"All right, Fischko," he said, "I will write the boy so soon as I get back to the office yet; but one thing I must beg of you: don't say a word about this to my partner, y'understand, because if he would hear that I am bringing home Elkan from the road just on account of this Shidduch you are proposing, understand me, he would make my life miserable."
Fischko shrugged his shoulders until his head nearly disappeared into his chest.
"What would I talk to your partner for, Mr. Scheikowitz?" he said. "I am looking to you in this here affair; so I would stop round the day after to-morrow afternoon, Mr. Scheikowitz, and if your partner asks me something a question, I would tell him I am selling thread oder buttons."
"Make it buttons," Scheikowitz commented, as he rose to his feet; "because we never buy buttons from nobody but the Prudential Button Company."
On his way back to his office Scheikowitz pondered a variety of reasons for writing Elkan to return, and he had tentatively adopted the most extravagant one when, within a hundred feet of his business premises, he encountered no less a personage than Julius Flixman.
"Wie geht's, Mr. Flixman?" he cried. "What brings you to New York?"
Flixman saluted Philip with a limp handclasp.
"I am living here now," he said. "I am giving up my store in Bridgetown schon six months ago already, on account I enjoyed such poor health there. So I sold out to a young feller by the name Max Kapfer, which was for years working by Paschalson, of Sarahcuse; and I am living here, as I told you."
"With relations maybe?" Philip asked.