"Max Gronauer died just two months after my husband," said Mrs. Samstag, tucking away into her beaded hand-bag her filet lace handkerchief, itself guilty of a not inexpensive attar.
"Thu-thu," clucked Mr. Latz for want of a fitting retort.
"Heigh-ho! I always say we have so little in common, me and Mrs. Gronauer. She revokes so in bridge, and I think it's terrible for a grandmother to blondine so red; but we've both been widows for almost eight years. Eight years," repeated Mrs. Samstag on a small scented sigh.
He was inordinately sensitive to these allusions, reddening and wanting to seem appropriate.
"Poor, poor little woman!"
"Heigh-ho," she said, and again, "Heigh-ho."
It was about the eyes that Mrs. Samstag showed most plainly whatever inroads into her clay the years might have gained. There were little dark areas beneath them like smeared charcoal and two unrelenting sacs that threatened to become pouchy.
Their effect was not so much one of years, but they gave Mrs. Samstag, in spite of the only slightly plump and really passable figure, the look of one out of health.
What ailed her was hardly organic. She was the victim of periodic and raging neuralgic fires that could sweep the right side of her head and down into her shoulder blade with a great crackling and blazing of nerves. It was not unusual for her daughter Alma to sit up the one or two nights that it could endure, unfailing, through the wee hours, with hot applications.
For a week sometimes, these attacks heralded their comings with little jabs, like the pricks of an exploring needle. Then the under-eyes began to look their muddiest. They were darkening now and she put up two fingers with little pressing movement to her temple.