"Once I said to poor papa, the night we paid the mortgage off and had wine for supper: 'Papa,' I said, 'we're out of debt now--_Gott sei Dank!_--except one debt we owe to some girl when Abie grows up; and that debt we got to pay with money that won't come from work and struggle and saving; we got to pay that debt with our boy--with _blood-money_.' Poor papa! Already he was asleep when I said it--half a glass of wine, and he was mussy-headed." "Yes, yes, mamma." "A girl like Beulah Washeim I ain't got so much use for neither--with her silk petticoats and silk stockings; but Sol Washeim's got a grand business there, Abie. They don't move in a nine-room house from a four-room apartment for nothing." "For Beulah's weight in gold I don't want her--the way she looks at me with her eyes and shoots 'em round like I was a three-ringed circus." "You're right--for money you shouldn't marry neither; only I always say it's just as easy to fall in love with a rich one as a poor one. But I'm the last one to force you. There's Hannah Rosenblatt--a grand, economical girl!" "Hannah Rosenblatt--a girl that teaches school, she pushes on me. I got to get educated yet!" Mrs. Ginsburg rocked and fanned rhythmically; her unsubtle lips curled upward with the subtle smile of a zingaro. The placidity of peace on a mountain-top, shade in a dell, and love in a garden crept into her tones. "I just want you to know I don't stand in your way, Abie. You ain't a child no more; but while I'm here you got so good a home as you want--not?" "Sure!" "Girls you can always get--not? Girls nowadays ain't what they used to be neither. I'd like to see a girl do to-day for papa what I did--how I was in the store and kitchen all at once; then we didn't have no satin-shoe clerks! Girls ain't what they used to be; in my day working-girls had no time for fine-smelling cologne-water and--" "All girls ain't alike, mamma--satin shoes cost no more nowadays as leather. We got a dollar-ninety-eight satin pump, you wouldn't believe it--and such a seller! All girls ain't alike, mamma." "What you mean, Abie?" Mr. Ginsburg turned on the couch so that his face was close to the wall, and his voice half lost in the curve of his arm. "Well, once in a while you come across a girl that ain't--ain't like the rest of 'em. Well, there ought to be girls that ain't like the rest of 'em, oughtn't there?" Mrs. Ginsburg's rocking and fanning slowed down a bit; a curious moment fell over the little room; a nerve-tingling quiescence that in its pregnant moment can race the mind back over an eternity--a silence that is cold with sweat, like the second when a doctor removes his stethoscope from over a patient's left breast and looks at him with a film of pity glazing his eyes. "What you mean, Abie? Tell mamma what you mean. I ain't the one to stand in your light." Mrs. Ginsburg's speech clogged in her throat.