"I couldn't," Sam protested.
"Very well, then," Mrs. Schrimm cried as she hurried to the kitchen. "Sit right down again, Sam; I would be right back."
When Mrs. Schrimm appeared a few minutes later she bore a cloth-covered tray which she placed on the table in front of Sam.
"You got until half-past twelve—ain't it?" she said; "so take your time, Sam. You should chew your food good, especially something which it is already half chopped, like gefüllte Rinderbrust."
"Gefüllte Rinderbrust!" Sam cried. "Why"—he poked at it with his knife—"Why, this always makes me sick." He balanced a good mouthful on his fork. "But, anyhow——" he concluded, and the rest of the sentence was an incoherent mumbling as he fell to ravenously. Moreover, he finished the succulent dish, gravy and all, and washed down the whole with a cup of coffee—not Hammersmith's coffee or the dark brown fluid, with a flavour of stale tobacco pipe, that Miss Babette Gembitz had come to persuade herself was coffee, but a fragrant decoction, softened by rich, sweet cream and containing all the delicious fragrance of the best thirty-five-cent coffee, fresh-ground from the grocer's.
"Ja, Henrietta," Sam cried as he rose to leave; "I am going to weddings and fashionable hotels, and I am eating with high-grade customers in restaurants which you would naturally take a high-grade customer to, understand me; but—would you believe me, Henrietta!—I am yet got to taste such coffee oder such gefüllte Rinderbrust as you are giving me now."
Mrs. Schrimm beamed her acknowledgment of the compliment.
"To-morrow you would get some chicken fricassee, Sam," she said, "if you would get here at half-past eleven sharp."
Sam shook her hand fervently.
"Believe me, I would try my best," he said; and fifteen minutes later, when Babette entered the Gembitz residence on One Hundred and Eighteenth Street, she found Sam as she had left him—fairly buried in the financial page of the morning paper.