There was in Mr. Lipkind precious little of Lothario, Launcelot, Galahad, or any of that blankety-blank-verse coterie. There remains yet unsung the lay of the five-foot-five, slightly bald, and ever so slightly rotund lover. Falstaff and Romeo are the extremes of what Mr. Lipkind was the not unhappy medium. Offhand in public places, men would swap crop conditions and city politics with him. Twice, tired mothers in railway stations had volunteered him their babies to dandle. Young women, however, were not all impervious to him, and uncrossed their feet and became consciously unconscious of him across street-car aisles. In his very Two Dollar Hat Store, Sara Minniesinger, hooked of profile, but who had impeccably kept his debits and credits for twelve years back under the stock-balcony and a green eye-shade, was wont to cry of evenings over and for him into her dingy pillow. He was so unconscious of this that, on the twelfth anniversary of her incarceration beneath the stock-balcony, he commissioned his mother to shop her a crown of thorns in the form of a gold-handled umbrella with a bachelor-girl flash-light attachment. There are men like that, to whom life is not only a theosophy of one God, but of one women who is sufficient thereof. When Samuel Lipkind greeted Clara Bloom there was just that in his ardently appraising glance. "Didn't mean to keep you waiting, Clara--a last-minute customer. _You_ know." "I've been counting red heads and wishing the Subway was pulled by white horses." "Say, Clara, but you look a picture! Believe me, Bettina, that is some lid!" Miss Bloom tucked up a rear strand of curl, turning her head to extreme profile for his more complete approval. "Is it an elegant trifle, Sam? I ask you is it an elegant trifle?" "Clara, it's--immense! The best yet! What did it set you back?" "Don't ask me! I'm afraid just saying it would give your mother heart-failure by mental telepathy." He linked her arm. "Whatever you paid, it's worth the money. It sets you off like a gipsy queen." "None of that, Sam! Mush is fattening." "Mush nothing! It's the truth." "Hurry. Schulem's got a new rule--no reserving the guest-table." They let themselves be swept into the great surge of the underground river with all of the rather thick-skinned unsensitiveness to shoulder-to-shoulder contact which the Subway engenders. Swaying from straps in a locked train, which tore like a shriek through a tube whose sides sweated dampness, they talked in voices trained to compete with the roar. "What's the idea, Clara? When you telephoned yesterday I was afraid maybe it was--Eddie Leonard cutting in on my night again." "Eddie nothing. Is it a law, Sam, that I have to eat off your mother every Wednesday night of my life?" "No--only--you know how it is when you get used to things one way." "I told you I had something to talk over, didn't I?" They were rounding a curve now, so that they swayed face to face, nose to nose.