"Oo-ee! What a Schreck you are giving me!" Mrs. Schrimm exclaimed. "This is Sam Gembitz, ain't it?"
"Sure it is," Sam replied. "Ain't you afraid somebody is going to come in and steal something on you?"
"That's that girl again!" Mrs. Schrimm said as she bustled out to the areaway and slammed the door. "That's one of them Ungarischer girls, Mr. Gembitz, which all they could do is to eat up your whole ice-box empty and go out dancing on Bauern balls till all hours of the morning. Housework is something they don't know nothing about at all. Well, Mr. Gembitz, I am hearing such tales about you—you are dying, and so on."
"Warum Mister Gembitz?" Sam said. "Ain't you always called me Sam, Henrietta?"
Mrs. Schrimm blushed. In the lifetime of the late Mrs. Gembitz she had been a constant visitor at the Gembitz house, but under Babette's chilling influence the friendship had withered until it was only a memory.
"Why not?" she said. "I certainly know you long enough, Sam."
"Going on thirty-five years, Henrietta," Sam said, "when you and me and Regina come over here together. Things is very different nowadays, Henrietta. Me, I am an old man already."
"What do you mean old?" Mrs. Schrimm cried. "When my Grossvater selig was sixty-eight he gets married for the third time yet."
"Them old-timers was a different proposition entirely, Henrietta," Sam said. "If I would be talking about getting married, Henrietta, the least that happens to me is my children would put me in a lunatic asylum yet."
"Yow!" Mrs. Schrimm murmured skeptically.