She wandered off, preoccupied. Semmel was a nobody, a clerk hired by the big brokers, in spite of his pretensions. But if the brokers, in their cold and analytical way, did decide at the end of the season that Goudeket's Green Acres didn't handle enough to make the operation worth their while, next year nobody would come around and bid for the horse-book concession. And it was the concession that pushed the resort over the line between red and black ink. You had to make money and you had to grow. Mr. Goudeket had never understood that. Orange trees were all very well, but since 1926 she had been the driver, the doer, the builder. And Mr. Goudeket had never got to Palestine after all, which showed that dreaming got you nowhere. She felt a guilty twinge. One year they could have made the cruise. One year there had been nothing urgent, which is a miraculous year in the resort business. She had put the money aside as a reserve and said nothing about it, and poor Mr. Goudeket couldn't understand a financial statement. The guests loved him, his Zionist connections had been valuable, though he never suspected it, and he had been a fine all-around handyman since the days in the Brighton Beach boarding house; he had saved them thousands of dollars with his clever hands and brought in thousands of dollars with his connections. But grow? He had never understood. And so he never got to see Palestine? What of it, anyway? And again Mrs. Goudeket felt the guilty twinge. She peered into the bar; it was doing a good business by candlelight. Her Young Marrieds--she grimaced--were getting drunk early. Dave Wax was on a barstool with an on-the-rocks glass in front of him; he was telling one of his stories. "Dave," she said softly, "when you've finished your drink why don't you give a little show for the people outside?" The comedian theatrically gulped from his glass and told his barmates loudly: "I love this dear lady. Just like my mother, she is. Just like my mother--always hollering, '_Get to work, ya bum!_'" He pranced out, grinning, on the tide of half-drunk laughter. She watched him from the bar for a minute; he went looping through the room loudly announcing a one-man show by that star of stage, screen, TV and radio, Dave Wax, also available for weddings and bar mitzvahs, call Murray Hill 3-41798805427--it went trailing on and on and on as he led them to circle him around the piano. He pounded out the introductory chords of his "Nervous in the Service" routine, which was very funny and not too dirty; from there she hoped he'd go into a community sing; that would calm the people down. She went to the switchboard again and snapped the toggle for the outside line. Try the electric company, get some kind of a real promise out of them, maybe bully her way through to the Load Dispatcher, a really responsible person, not like their phone girls.