"I don't know what comes over you lately, Belz," Lesengeld complained the following morning. "Every day you come down looking like a bear mit a spoiled tail."
"I got a right to look that way," Belz replied. "If you would got such a wife's relation like I got it, Lesengeld, there'd be no sitting in the same office with you at all. When it isn't one thing it's another. Yesterday my wife's mother's a sister's cousin gets a day off and comes round and gets dinner with us. I think I told you about her before—Miss Blooma Duckman. Nothing suits that woman at all. The way she acts you would think she lives in the bridal soot at the Waldorfer, and she gets my wife so mad, understand me, that she throws away a whole dish of Tzimmus in the garbage can already—which I got to admit that the woman is right, Lesengeld—my wife don't make the finest Tzimmus in the world."
"Suppose she don't," Lesengeld commented. "Ain't it better she should spoil some Tzimmus which all it's got into it is carrots, potatoes, and a little chuck? If it would be that she makes a failure mit Gänse oder chickens which it really costs money, understand me, then you got a right to kick."
"That's what I says," Belz replied, "aber that Miss Duckman takes everything so particular. She kicks about it all the way up in the subway, which the next time I get one of my wife's relations in a Home, either it would be so far away she couldn't come to see us at all, or it would be so nearby that I don't got to lose a night's rest seeing her home. I didn't get to bed till pretty near two o'clock."
He stifled a yawn as he sat down at his desk.
"All the same, Lesengeld," he added, "they certainly got a nice place up there for old women. There's lots of respectable business men pays ten dollars a week for their wives in the Catskills already which they don't got it so comfortable. Ain't it a shame, Lesengeld, that with a charity like that which is really a charity, people don't support it better as they do?"
"I bet yer!" Lesengeld cried. "The way some people acts not only they ain't got no hearts, y'understand, but they ain't got no sense, neither. I seen a case yesterday where an old Rosher actually refuses to pay a month's rent for his son's widder mit a little boy, to save 'em being put out on the sidewalk. Afterward he goes broke, understand me, and when the boy grows up he's got the nerve to make a touch from him a couple of dollars and the boy goes to work and gives it to him. If I would be the boy the old man could starve to death; I wouldn't give him not one cent. They call us sharks, Belz, but compared with such a Haman we ain't even sardines."
"Sure, I know," Belz said as he consulted the firm's diary; "and if you wouldn't waste your time going on so many moving pictures, Lesengeld, might you would attend to business maybe. Yesterday was ten days that feller Rudnik's mortgage is past due, and what did you done about it? Nothing, I suppose."
"Suppose again, Belz," Lesengeld retorted. "A feller was in here to see me about it and I agreed we would give Rudnik an extension."
"What!" Belz cried. "You agreed you would give him an extension! Are you crazy oder what? The way money is so tight nowadays and real estate gone to hellandall, we as good as could get a deed of that house from that feller."