Just Around the Corner Part 23

He gathered her up and laid her head backward on his shoulder, so that her face was foreshortened and close to his.

"Goldie-eyes," he said, "I'll make it up to you! I'll make it up to you!" And he made a motion as though to kiss her where the curls lay on her face, but drew back as if sickened.

"Good G.o.d!" he said. "Poor little baby!"

Quick as a throb of a heart she turned her left cheek, smooth as a lily petal, to his lips.

"It's all right, Harry!" she said, in a voice that was tight. "I'm crazy, I guess; but, gee, it's great to be crazy!"

"I'll make it up to you, baby. See if I don't! I'll make it up to you."

She kissed him, and his lips were hot and dry.

"Lemme fix your plaster, dearie; you got one of your colds."

"Don't get it too hot, hon."

"Gee! Lemme straighten up. Say, ain't you a messer, though! Look at this here wash-stand and those neckties! Ain't you a messer, though, dearie!"

She crammed the ties into a dresser drawer, dragged a chair into place, removed a small tin can from the wash-stand drawer, hung her hat and jacket on their peg, and lowered the shade.

MARKED DOWN

Along with radium, parcels post, wireless telegraphy, and orchestral church music came tight skirts and the hipless movement.

Adolph Katzenstein placed his figurative ear to the ground, heard the stealthy whisper of soft messalines and clinging charmeuse, and sold out the Empire s.h.i.+rt-waist Company for twenty-five hundred dollars at a slight loss.

Five years later the Katzenstein Neat-Fit Petticoat was flaunted in the red and white electric lights in the lightest part of Broadway, and the figure of an ecstatic girl in an elastic-top, charmeuse-ruffled petticoat had become as much of an epic in street-car advertising as the flakiest breakfast food or the safest safety razor.

Then the Katzensteins moved from a simplex to a complex apartment, furnished the dining-room in Flemish oak and the bedroom in white mahogany; Mrs. Katzenstein telephoned to her fancy grocer's for artichokes instead of buying cabbages from the street-vender, and Mr.

Katzenstein walked with the four fingers of each hand thrust into the distended front pockets of his trousers.

On the first Tuesday of each month Mrs. Katzenstein entertained at whist--an antediluvian survival of a bridgeless era.

At eight o'clock in the morning of one of these first Tuesdays she entered her daughter's white-mahogany bedroom, raised the shades with a clatter, and drew back the curtains.

"Birdie, get up! It's late, and we got house-cleaning this morning.

Papa's been gone already an hour."

The pink-and-white flowered comforter on the bed stirred, and two plump arms, with frills of lace falling backward, raised up like st.u.r.dy monoliths in the stretch that accompanies a yawn.

"Aw--yaw--yaw--mamma! Can't you let a girl sleep after she's been up late? Tell Tillie she should begin her sweeping in the hall."

"I should know what time you got home last night. You sneak in like you was afraid it would give me some pleasure to wake up and hear about it!

Who was there? What did Marcus have to say?"

"Aw, mamma, let me sleep--can't you? I'll get up in a minute."

"So close-mouthed she is--goes to the party with a grand boy like Marcus and comes home like she was muzzled! Nothing to say! If I was out with a young man so often I could talk."

"Please, mamma, pull down the shade."

"'Please, mamma, pull down the shade!'" mimicked Mrs. Katzenstein, in a high falsetto. "After I rush round all day yesterday for the pink wreath for her hair, that's what I hear the next morning--that's the thanks I get!"

Birdie pulled the comforter up closer about her ears, and the head on the rumpled pillow burrowed deeper.

"And such laziness! I been up two hours with my _Kuchen_ and cheese-pie fixed already for this afternoon, and my daughter sleeps like a lady!

The man that gets her I don't envy!"

The pink-and-white mound on the bed heaved like a s.h.i.+p at sea.

"In a minute, mamma!"

Mrs. Katzenstein jerked up a filmy gown from across the back of a chair and held it from her at arm's-length.

"Anybody's too good for a girl that ain't got no order! I wonder what Marcus Gump would say if he knew how you treat your things? Her good pink dress that I paid twenty dollars for the making alone she throws round like it cost nothing! Sack-cloth is too good! I don't put it away--you can wait on yourself."

However, as she spoke Mrs. Katzenstein folded the pink gown, with an avalanche of lace flowing from the bodice, lengthwise in a drawer and smothered it with tissue-paper.

"That a girl like that shouldn't be ashamed to let her poor old mother wait on her!"

"I'd put it away, mamma, if you'd just give me time."

"Tuesday, when I have the ladies and my card party, she sleeps! No consideration that girl has got for her mother!"

Birdie swung herself to the side of the bed; her wealth of crow-blue hair fell over her shoulders; sleep trembled on her lashes.

"I'm up, ain't I? Now are you satisfied?"

"For all the help you are to me you might as well stay in bed the rest of the morning. A girl that can come home from a party and have nothing to say! But for my part I don't want to know. I guess they had a big blow-out, didn't they?"

Birdie, high-chested as Juno, with wide, firm shoulders that sloped as must have sloped the shoulders of Artemis when they tempted Actaeon, coiled her hair before the mirror with the gesture that has belonged to women since first they coiled their hair. Her cheeks, fleshly but fruit-like in their freshness, might have belonged to a buxom nymph of the grove.

"I wish you could have seen the spread Jeanette had, mamma! I brought home the recipe for her lobster chops. I'll bet if she had one she had six different kinds of ice-cream."

With one swoop Mrs. Katzenstein flung the snowy avalanche of pillows and sheets over the footboard of the bed and opened wide both the windows.

"Tillie," she cried, "bring me the broom. I'll start in Miss Birdie's room while you finish the breakfast dishes."

"Such an affair as she had! I said to Marcus, on the way home, it could have been at Delmonico's and not have been finer."

"You don't say so! Such is life, ain't it? We knew Simon Lefkowitz when he used to come to papa and buy for his stock six s.h.i.+rt-waists at a time. Then they didn't live in no eighty-dollar apartment. Many's the morning I used to meet the old lady at market. Who else was there?"

"Who? Let me see! Gertie Glauber was there. She had on that dress Laevitt made; and, believe me, I liked mine better. Tekla Stein and Morris Adler--you know those Adlers in the millinery business?"