"Excuse me, Mr. Feigenbaum," Abe said with less jocularity, "I didn't mean it no harm."
Together they entered the elevator, and Abe
created a diversion by handing Mr. Feigenbaum a large, black cigar with a wide red-and-gold band on it. While Feigenbaum was murmuring his thanks the elevator man stopped the car at the fifth floor.
"Here we are!" Abe cried, and hustled out of the elevator ahead of Mr. Feigenbaum. He opened the outer door of Potash & Perlmutter's loft with such rapidity that there was no time for Feigenbaum to decipher the sign on its ground-glass panel, and the next moment they stood before the green-baize swinging doors.
"After you, Mr. Feigenbaum," Abe said. He followed his late customer up the passageway between the mahogany partitions, into the show-room.
"Take a chair, Mr. Feigenbaum," Abe cried, dragging forward a comfortable, padded seat, into which Feigenbaum sank with a sigh.
"I wish we could get it furniture like this up in Bridgetown," Feigenbaum said. "A one-horse place like Bridgetown you can't get nothing there. Everything you got to come to New York for. We are dead ones in Bridgetown. We don't know nothing and we don't learn nothing."
"That's right, Mr. Feigenbaum," Abe said. "You got to come to New York to get the latest wrinkles about everything."
With one comprehensive motion he drew forward a chair for himself and waved a warning to Morris, who ducked behind a rack of cloaks in the rear of the show-room.
"You make yourself to home here, Potash, I must say," Feigenbaum observed.