"That flat of yours up there or any other one under the conditions would be run like the ark. I'm an up-to-date girl, I am. There's not a girl living would be willing to marry a well-off fellow like you and go huck herself in a place she couldn't even have the running of herself or have her own say-so about the purse-strings. It may sound unbecoming, but when I marry I'm going to better myself, I am." "I--why--" "If she can't even stand for her own son-in-law walking into his own kitchen in his own house--Oh, you don't find me starting my married life that way at this late date. I haven't held off five years for that." Mr. Lipkind pushed back his but slightly tasted food, lines of strain and a certain whiteness out in his face. "It--it just seems awful, Clara, this going around in a circle and not getting anywheres." "I'm at the end of my rope, I am." "I see your point in a way, Clara, but, my God! a man's mother is his mother! It's eating up my life just as it's eating yours, but what you going to do about it? It just seems the best years of our life are going, waiting for God knows what." Hands clasped until her finger-nails whitened, Miss Bloom leaned across the table, her voice careful and concentrated. "Now you said something! That's why you and me are here alone together to-night. There's not going to be a sixth year of this kind of waiting between us. Things have got to come to a head. I've got a chance, Sam, to marry. Eddie Leonard has asked me." "I--thought so." "Eddie Leonard ain't a Sam Lipkind, but after the war his five-thousand-dollar job is down at Arnstein's waiting for him, and he's got a good stiff bank-account saved as good as yours and--and no strings to it. I believe in a girl facing those facts the same as any other facts. Why, I--this war and all--why, if anything was to happen to you to-morrow--us unmarried this way--I'd be left high and dry without so much as a penny to show for the best five years of my life. We've got to do one thing or another, Sam. I believe in a girl being practical as well as romantic." "I--see your point, Clara." "I'm done with going around in this circle of ours." "You mean--" "You know what I mean." The lower half of Mr. Lipkind's face seemed to lock, as it were, into a kind of rigidity which shot out his lower jaw. "I'll see Eddie Leonard burning like brimstone before I let him have you!" "Well?" "God! I don't know what to say--I don't know what to say!" "That's your trouble, Sam; you're so chicken-hearted you--" "My father died when I was five, Clara, and no matter what my feelings are to you, there's no power on earth can make me quit having to be him as well as a son to my mother. Maybe it sounds softy to you--but if I got to pay with her happiness for--ours--then I never want happiness to the day I die." "In other words, it's the mother first."