But the way to Feigenbaum's heart lay through his stomach just as accurately as it avoided his pocketbook, so that when Miss Fannie Goldblatt suggested, after the final curtain, that they all go up to One Hundred and Eighteenth Street and have a supper at home instead of at a restaurant, she made a dent in Feigenbaum's affections.
"Looky here, Birdie," Philip whispered, "how about the old man?"
"Don't you worry about him," she said. "He went to Brownsville to play auction pinocle, and I bet yer he don't get home till five o'clock."
Half an hour afterward they sat around the dining-room table, and Fannie helped Feigenbaum to a piece of gefüllte Fische, a delicacy which never appears on the menus of rural hotels in Pennsylvania. At the first mouthful Feigenbaum looked at Fannie Goldblatt, and while, to be sure, she did have some hair on her upper lip, it was only a slight down which at the second mouthful became still slighter. Indeed, after the third slice of fish Feigenbaum was ready to declare it to be a most becoming down, very bewitching and Spanish in appearance.
Following the gefüllte Fische came a species of tripe farcie, the whole being washed down with coffee and topped off with delicious cake—cake which could be adequately described only by kissing the tips of one's fingers.
"After all, Margolius," Feigenbaum commented as he lit an all-tobacco cigarette on their way down the front stoop of the Goldblatt residence—"after all, she ain't such a bad-looking woman. I seen it lots worser, Margolius."
"That's nothing what we got it this evening," Philip said as they started off for the subway; "you should taste the Kreploch what that girl makes it."
"I'm going to," Feigenbaum said; "they asked me I should come to dinner to-morrow night."
But Philip knew from his own experience that the glamour engendered of Fannie's gefüllte Fische would soon be dispelled, and then Henry Feigenbaum would hie him to the northern-tier counties of Pennsylvania, leaving Philip's love affair in worse condition than before.
"I got to cinch it," he murmured to himself as he went downtown next morning, "before that one-eyed feller skips out on me."