"How she sits here in the dark. Thank goodness, Sadie, electricity we don't have to economize on." She pushed a wall key, a center chandelier of frosted electric bulbs springing into radiance. In its immediate glare Mrs. Loeb regarded her daughter-in-law, inert there beside the window. "Get your embroidery, Sadie, and come down by me and Etta till the men get home to supper. I want her to show you that cut-work stitch she's putting in her lunch napkins." "Ugh!" "What?" Mrs. Bertha Loeb approached with the forward peer of the nearsighted. Time and maternity had had their whacks at her figure, her stoutness enhanced by a bothersome shelf of bust, but her face--the same virile profile of her son's and with the graying hair parted tightly from it--guiltless of lines, except now, regarding her daughter-in-law, a horizontal crease came into her brow. "You want to go sit a while by grandma, then?" "No. Gee! can't--can't a girl just sit up in her room quiet? I'm all right." "I didn't say, Sadie, you wasn't all right. Only a young girl with everything to be thankful for don't need to sit up in her room like it was a funeral, with her mother and sister and grandma in the same house." On the mahogany arms of her chair Mrs. Herman Loeb's small hand closed in a tight fist over her damp wad of handkerchief, "I--I--" "What?" "Nothing." "Sadie, you been crying again." "What if I have?" "A fine answer from a girl to her mother." "I--you--you drive me to it--your questions--" "I shouldn't have the interest of my own son's wife at heart!" "Can't a girl get--get blue?" "Blue?" "Yes, blue." Mrs. Bertha Loeb reached out her hand with its wide marriage band slightly indented in flesh; the back of that hand was speckled with large, lightish freckles and trembled slightly. "Sadie, ain't there just no way we can make you feel happy in St. Louis? Last night through the door to my room I couldn't help hear again you and Herman with a scene. Take your feet down off the plush, Sadie." "Oh yes, you heard, all right." "'Ain't you got a good home here, Sadie? Everything in the world a girl could wish for! A husband as good as gold, like his poor dead father before him. 'Ain't we done everything, me and my Etta, to make you feel how--how glad we are to have you for our Hermie's wife?" "Oh, I know, I know." "What maybe we felt in the beginning--well, wasn't it natural, an only son and coming such a surprise--all that's over now. Why, it's a pleasure to see how grandma she loves you." "I--I'm all right, I tell you." "Didn't we even fix it you should go in a flat on Waterman Avenue housekeeping for yourself, if you wanted it?" "Yes, and tie myself down to this dump yet. Not much!" "Well, I only hope, Sadie Loeb, you never got in your life to live in a worse dump. I know this much, I have tried to do my part. Did I sign over this house to you and Herman for a wedding present, giving only to my own daughter the row of Grand Avenue stores?"