Insidious darkness crept into the room like a cool hand descending on the feverish brow of day; the red glow shifted farther along the mantel and lay vivid as blood across the blue vase and the photograph of a grizzled head in a seashell frame. Mrs. Ginsburg rocked over a loose board in the floor and waved a palm-leaf fan toward the reclining shadow of her son until he could taste its tape-bound edge. "Next week to-night five years since we lost poor papa, Abie--five years! _Gott!_ When I think of it! Just like his picture he looked up to the last, too--just like his picture." "Yes, mamma." "I ain't so spry as I used to be, neither, Abie--or, believe me, I would never let you take on a clerk. Sometimes I think, when the rheumatism gets up round my heart, it won't be long as I go too. Poor papa! If I could have gone with him! How he always hated to go alone to places! To the barber he hated to go, till I got so I could cut it myself." "Mamma, you ain't got nothing to worry about." "I worry enough." "You can take it as easy as you want to now--I even want we should have a better apartment. We got the best little business between here and One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street! If poor papa could see it now he wouldn't know it from five years ago. Poor papa! He wasn't willing to spend on improvements." "Papa always said you had a good business head on you, Abie; but I ain't one, neither, for funny businesses like a clerk. And what you needed them new glass shoe-stands for when the old ones--" "Now, mamma, don't begin on that again." "When I was down in the store papa used to say to me: 'Wait till Abie's grown up, mamma! By how his ears stand out from his head I can tell he's got good business sense.' And to think that so little of you he had in the store--such a man that deserved the best of everything! He had to die just when things might have got easy for him." "Don't cry, mamma; everything is for the best." "You're a good boy, Abie. Sometimes I think I stand in your way enough." "Such talk!" "Any girl would do well enough for herself to get you. Believe me, Beulah Washeim don't need a new pair of shoes every two weeks for nothing! Her mother thinks I don't notice it--she's always braggin' to me how hard her Beulah is on shoes and what a good customer she makes." "Beulah Washeim! I don't even know what last she wears--that's how much I think of Beulah Washeim." "Don't let me stand in your way, Abie. Ain't I often told you, now since you do a grand business and we're all paid up, don't let your old mother stand in your way?" "Like you could be in my way!"