Rudnik waved his hand feebly.
"I'll take your word for it," he said, and again lapsed into quietude.
"D'ye know," he murmured at length, "I ain't drunk a good cup coffee in years already?"
Miss Duckman made no answer. Indeed she dropped her sewing and passed noiselessly out of the room, and when she returned ten minutes later she bore on a linen-covered tray a cup of steaming, fragrant coffee.
"How was that?" Miss Duckman asked after he had emptied the cup.
Rudnik wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
"All I could say is," he replied, "if your Tzimmus ain't no worser as your coffee, Miss Duckman, nobody could kick that you ain't a good cook."
Miss Duckman's faded cheeks grew pink and she smiled happily.
"I guess you are trying to make me a compliment," she said.
"In my whole life I never made for a woman a compliment," Rudnik declared. "I never even so much as met one I could make a compliment to yet except you, and mit you it ain't no compliment, after all. It's the truth."